the Sultan’s guard, and the white and black eunuchs, with faces like Magi or idols, glittering, plumed, their heads covered with Persian fur, or wearing metal helmets or purple caps, or odd-looking turbans shaped like crescents, cones, and reversed pyramids: they are armed with steel clubs, murderous-looking daggers, and whips, like a band of cut-throats and assassins. One regards you with a look of suspicious contempt; another grinds his teeth; another gazes straight ahead of him, with eyes grown callous from the sight of blood; while a fourth wears upon his lips a smile that is truly devilish. After these follows the corps of the Janissaries, accompanied by its patron saint, Emin Baba, an emaciated individual clad in a white tunic, and officers of every grade, each personating some office connected with the kitchen: all the ranks of the soldiers are represented, wearing the various uniforms and emblems of that insolent corps which finally met its end under the grape-shot of Mahmûd. The childishness, at once grotesque and puerile, of these costumes, combined with the ferocious memories they evoke, produces the impression of a savage Carnival. No artist, however unbridled his imagination might be, could ever succeed in portraying such a mad confusion of royal costumes, ecclesiastical vestments, and garments suitable for brigands and buffoons. The “water-carriers,” the “soup-makers,” the “chief cooks,” the “head of the scullions,” soldiers to whom were assigned all sorts of special duties, succeed one another in long lines, with brushes and ladles fastened to their turbans, bells hung from their tunics, carrying leather bottles and the famous kettles which sounded the signal for revolt, clad in large fur caps and long cloaks falling from neck to heels like magicians’ mantles, with their wide belts made of round disks of engraved metal, their huge sabres, their fishy eyes, their enormous chests, and faces set in every variety of derision, menace, and insult. Last of all come the Seraglio mutes, silken noose in hand, and the dwarfs and buffoons, with cunning, spiteful faces, and mock crowns on their heads. [Illustration: Türbeh of the Mosque Shabzadeh.] The great glass cases in which all these worthies are enclosed lend something of the look of an anatomical museum to the place, and increase their likeness to mummified human beings, so that from time to time you are conscious of a disagreeable creeping sensation down your backbone, or feel as though you might just have passed through a room of the Old Seraglio in the presence of the entire court whom some threatening outburst from the Pâdishah has frozen stiff with terror. When you at last come out upon the square of the At-Meidan, and your eye falls upon pashas clad all in sombre black, and nizams modestly attired in the uniform of zouaves, oh how gentle, amiable, almost timid, does the Turk of our day and generation appear! [Illustration: Tombs of Sultan Mahmûd II and of his Son, Abdul Aziz.]