But now a most tantalizing experience begins. While our attention is concentrated upon one beautiful sight we are missing a thousand others. While we stand gazing at Beshiktash and Cheragan, the Asiatic shore, whose charming villages tempt one to buy and carry them off like jewels, is flying by. Kuzgunjik disappears, tinted with every color of the rainbow, where tradition says the heifer Io landed after swimming the Bosphorus in order to escape from the gad-flies of Hera; and Istavros, with its beautiful mosque and two minarets; and the imperial palace of Beylerbey, with its conical and pyramidal roofs and its gray and yellow walls, wearing the same strange, mysterious look that a convent of princesses might have; and then Beylerbey village, reflected in the water, with Mount Bûlgurlû rising behind it; and all those other villages, with houses grouped closely together or else scattered about at the foot of little bright green hills, and so overgrown with vegetation that it seems as though they would sink out of sight altogether. Long garlands of villas and little houses, and avenues of trees connect them, running along the bank or descending in zigzag lines from the neighboring heights to the water’s edge, through numberless flower and vegetable gardens, and meadows laid out in squares, connected by little flights of stone steps and bright with every conceivable shade of green. [Illustration: Mosque of Validêh at Ak Serai.] Well, there is no help for it; we must resign ourselves to catching nothing more than a flying glimpse of it all, and can only get that by turning our heads from side to side with the monotonous regularity of automatons.