From this point I recrossed the valley of the Lycus, and again took the road which skirts the walls, still lonely and deserted and still winding between ruins and cemeteries, passing before the ancient military Gate of Pempti, now walled up, and again crossing the Lycus, which enters the city at this point, I found myself in front of the Cannon Gate, so called from the circumstance of Orbano’s great gun having been stationed opposite it; here Muhammad II. made his last and successful assault upon the fortifications. Raising my eyes to the top of the wall, I was startled at encountering the gaze of two or three dark, unprepossessing-looking individuals with wild, matted hair, who peered down at me from behind the battlements with an expression of astonishment, and then remembered to have heard that a band of gypsies had established themselves in the ruined towers and more habitable parts of the fortification. The traces left at this point of the fearful conflict are grand and awe-inspiring beyond expression--crumbling, dismantled walls, towers knocked to pieces or battered out of shape, bastions buried beneath huge masses of rubbish, loopholes burst open, the earth ploughed up, and the moat filled with colossal fragments which look like masses detached from the side of a rugged mountain. It is as though the terrific battle had been waged only the preceding day, and these ruins speak more eloquently than could any human voice of the frightful disaster of which they are the witnesses. It was the same, with but slight modification, before every gate in the whole line of the defences. The battle began at daybreak, with the Ottoman forces divided into four enormous columns preceded by a hundred thousand volunteers, who formed an immense vanguard predestined to death. All of this food for the cannon, this reckless, undisciplined horde of Tartars, Caucasians, Arabs, and negroes, directed by sheikhs spurred on by dervishes, driven and lashed from behind by furious bands of sciaus, hurled itself forward to the attack laden with earth and faggots, forming one unbroken line and raising one unearthly yell from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn. On reaching the edge of the moat they are momentarily checked by a hailstorm of stone and iron missiles, beating hundreds upon hundreds to the ground, pierced with arrows, blown to pieces by the cannonballs, set fire to by _springals_, beaten, crushed, and torn asunder--old men, boys, slaves, thieves, shepherds, brigands, hewn down by the thousand, until before long the moat and banks are filled with dead bodies, heaps of quivering flesh, blood-stained turbans, bows, and cimeters, across which still other hordes, driven forward by those behind, rush to the attack, only to be beaten back, overturned, repulsed, decimated by a still more furious storm of stones and arrows from the walls; while a dense cloud of smoke and dust envelops alike besiegers and besieged, living