Of a very different character is the hollow of converging valleys outside the city wall where lies, at the end of the Golden Horn proper, the suburb of Eyoub Soultan. Eyoub Soultan, _anglice_ Prince Job, takes its name from a friend and standard-bearer of the Prophet who took part in the third Arab siege of Constantinople in 668 and fell outside the walls. Of this good man and his last resting-place so many legendary things are related that I don’t know where my chapter would end if I repeated only the few of them I have heard. I can only say that when Sultan Mehmed II was making his own siege, eight hundred years later, he opportunely discovered the burial-place of the saintly warrior. This discovery having stimulated the flagging ardour of the besiegers, with what results we know, the Conqueror built a splendid mausoleum above the grave of the Prophet’s friend and beside it the first of the imperial mosques. To this, the holiest shrine of Islam in Constantinople, the sultans come for that ceremony which takes for them the place of a coronation—to be girded with the sword of Osman. So holy a shrine is it that until the re-establishment of the constitution in 1908 no Christian had ever entered that mosque except in disguise, or so much as its outer court. Even now it is not easy for a Christian to see the inside of the _türbeh_. I have not, at all events. But I count myself happy to have seen its outer wall of blue and green tiles, shaded by broad eaves and pierced in the centre by an intricate grille of brass which shines where the fingers of the faithful pass over the letters of the creed. And I must confess that I lay up no grudge against the _imams_ for keeping me out. I cannot say it is for the same reason that another man of God, with whom I sometimes sit in front of another tomb in Stamboul, once gave me for never having been himself in the tomb of Eyoub: that he did not feel himself worthy. It is, rather, an inconsistent feeling that I am not sorry if some things and some places still be held sacred in the world. On one side of the tomb, opening out of the same tiled wall, is a _sebil_ where an attendant waits to give cups of cold water to the thirsty. On the other side a window opens through a grille of small green bronze hexagons into a patch of garden where a few rose-bushes stand among graves. And in the centre of the quadrangle stand two enormous plane-trees, or what is left of them, planted there by the Conqueror five hundred years ago. The mosque itself is not very interesting, having been restored too many times. It contains one much-prized relic, however, consisting of a print of the Prophet’s foot in stone. Beside the mosque and the forecourt is a second court, larger and irregular in shape, also shaded by plane-trees, where, furthermore, are a fountain of ablution and painted gravestones in railings and a colony of pigeons that are pampered like those of St. Mark’s. [Illustration: Eyoub]