The _türbehs_ cluster so thickly between the mosque and the water that one avenue is lined by nothing else, and from it little paved alleys wander away between crowded gravestones and arching trees. Few of the trees are cypresses here. The cypresses inhabit a hill beyond this silent quarter, and through them climbs the most picturesque street in Eyoub. Toward the top it forks. Whichever way you take, you will do well, particularly in the spring, when the left-hand lane brings you into sight of a blossoming valley of fruit-trees. But you will do better after all to take the right-hand turn and climb a little farther, the cypresses and gravestones thinning as you climb, till you come to a coffee-house that did not need Pierre Loti to make it famous. Any man who gazes from a height upon leagues of space and many habitations of his fellow men is forced into philosophy. Here, however, you sip in with your coffee strange things indeed as you look down from your high cemetery edge, past cypresses and turbaned stones and the minarets of the mosque and the procession of siege-battered towers scaling the slope beyond, upon the whole picture of the Golden Horn framed between its two beetling cities. The outer bridge, to be sure, is cut off by the curve of Galata; but the heights of Scutari, or sometimes those of the Bithynian Olympus, are visible to remind you what a meeting-place of nations is here. [Illustration: The cemetery of Eyoub] On this hilltop stood in old times the castle of Cosmidion, where Godfrey of Bouillon and Bohemund stopped with their men on the way to the first crusade. The castle took its name from the adjoining church of SS. Cosmas and Damian, built by Theodosius the Younger and rebuilt with magnificence by Justinian. In times still older this was the hill called Semistra—or so I shall choose to believe until some one proves me wrong. Walking along its bare crest, where you sometimes meet camels marching strangely in from the villages of Thrace, you overlook that last reach of the Golden Horn which used to be called Argyrolimnai, the Silver Pools. Two small streams come together here, the Cydaris and the Barbyses as they once were called, and they played a particular part in the mythology of Byzantium. Io, fleeing from the jealousy of Hera, gave birth to her daughter Keroessa at the foot of the hill where the two streams meet. The child was nursed by Semistra, who gave her name to the hill in question, and in whose honour an altar anciently stood at the meeting-place of the rivers. Keroessa became in turn the mother of Byzas, founder of Byzantium. The father of Byzas was no less a personage than Poseidon, god of the sea, and the son married Phidalia, daughter of the river Barbyses. How it happened that Byzas also came from so far away as Megara I do not pretend to know; but in the name Keroessa, which seems to be connected with the metamorphosis of Io, we have the mythic origin of the name of the Golden Horn.