Nothing could be more abrupt than the contrast between the slopes facing each other across the busy waterway, with all their picturesque detail of garden, roof, and minaret, and the plateau of which the Bosphorus is nothing but a crooked blue crack. From the Place of Martyrs it rolls desolately away to the west, almost without a house or a tree to break its monotony. Gullies cut it here and there. Patches of scrub-oak darken its surface. Sheep move slowly across it, looking in the distance like maggots in a texture of homespun. Otherwise you would never suppose that life existed there. As you watch the sun set across those great empty fields it is incredible that somewhere beyond them tilled lands and swarming cities are. Your impression is not of mere wildness, however. Two abandoned stone windmills on a far-off hill give the note of the impression. Such silence is the silence that follows upon the beating of many drums. You may sit upon that hilltop in evening light and drink melancholy like an intoxication, musing upon all the change and indifference of the world. Yet life lingers there still—life that neither indifference nor change, nor time nor ruin nor death can ever quite stamp out. Threads of water creep through some of the dry gullies, swelling after rain into noisy brooks. Above them hang patches of cultivation, dominated by the general brownness and bareness, but productive of excellent strawberries in the spring. That, too, is one of the times when the brown brightens for a little to green, while June colours whole tracts of hillside with butcher’s-broom and the wild rose. And then I have said nothing of heather, of crocuses, of violets, of I know not how many flowers scattered along certain lonely lanes. On the edge of the village these are paved like streets and pleasantly arched with bay-trees. In the bottoms of the ravines, also, they have in their season quite a sylvan air. They lead to stony trails in the open where you may meet a soldier, an Albanian shepherd, or a peasant in gay jacket and baggy blue trousers, wandering from nowhere to nowhere.