Outside this inner citadel the fabled gardens descended to the sea. Fabled they proved, indeed—as some city park, perhaps, though not so neatly kept. A driveway, fabulously dusty, led between the massive retaining wall and a miniature lake to Merassim Kiosque, a tawdry little palace in an enclosure of its own which was built for William II of Germany. I threaded a tortuous space, at one end of it not quite touching the bastion of the Forbidden City, where a small iron door in the kiosk faced a small iron door in the bastion. They had a potency, those small iron doors, upon the imagination of a romantic impressionist. Beyond stretched courts and stables, deserted save for a few last activities of departure. A eunuch was giving shrill orders to a soldier. A drove of buffaloes stood mild-eyed under a plane-tree, waiting to be driven away. A horse whinnied in the silence. A cat lay blinking in the sun, indifferent to the destinies of kings. On a slope of thin shade farther on were grouped an ornate wooden villa, a castellated porcelain factory, kennels where a few dogs yelped miserably, and enclosures for all sorts of animals and birds. The one really charming part of the park was the ravine behind Chira’an Palace, cool with secular trees and the splash of water. Nightingales and strange water-fowl had their habitation there, and some startled colts galloped away as I descended a winding path. The look of the paths, neither wild nor ordered, made me wonder again what four hundred gardeners did at Yîldîz. I suppose they did what any gardener would do whose master never came to see his garden. Chalets and summer-houses with red seals on their doors stood among the trees. I went into an open lodge beside a gateway. A bed was torn to pieces, clothes and papers strewed the floor, a cut loaf and an open bottle stood on a shelf as if dropped there in some hasty flight. There was a point on the hillside whence a long view opened—of domed Stamboul and cypressed Scutari reaching toward each other across an incredible blue, with dim Asiatic mountains in the background. From the height above he must often have looked out on that scene who brooded for thirty-three years, in silence and darkness, behind the walls his terror raised. So noble against sea and sky, so vastly spreading, so mysterious in its invisible activities, the city must have been as redoubtable to him as his bastioned hilltop was to the city. And I could not help imagining how, during the days so lately passed, as he watched the city that feared his power and whose power he feared, sounds must have come up to him: of the foolish firing he ordered for the 13th of April; of a more sinister firing eleven days later, when he waited for his deluded and officerless soldiers, shut up in their barracks, to save his throne; of that last firing, for him the sound of doom, proclaiming to his face the joy of the distant city that his power over it was no more.