I next came to the Tetarte Gate, now only distinguished by means of its two towers standing close together. All this part of the walls is in a much better state of preservation than the rest; long portions of the bastions of Theodosius are still standing almost intact, as well as the charming towers erected by the prefect Anthemius and emperor Ciro Constantine, whose invincible summits, crowned by fifteen centuries, seem to defy the ravages of time and fury of man. At some points peasants have erected upon the curtains huts whose slight construction offers a strange contrast to the massive masonry around them, like birds’-nests built upon the side of some beetling cliff. And to the right are the same interminable, unbroken succession of cypress groves and cemeteries, rising and falling with the rise and fall of the earth, the little valleys all gray with tombstones: here a dervish convent is half hidden by a circle of plane trees; there a solitary café stands with its fountain and willow, and beyond the trees white footpaths wind away and are lost to view in the rising ground of the bare and arid plain, beneath the brilliant sky, against which vultures may be seen slowly circling upward. Another quarter of an hour’s walk brought me to the gate called _Yeni Mevlevi_, from a famous dervish monastery opposite it. The gateway is low, with four marble columns built into it, and a square lower on either side, bearing an inscription of Ciro Constantine dated 447, and another of Justinian II. and Sophia, in which the imperial names are incorrectly spelled--a rather striking proof of the barbaric ignorance of the fifth century. I peered through the gateway up at the walls, into the monastery, and the cemetery, but there was not a living soul to be seen anywhere, so, after resting a while with my back against the parapet of a little bridge thrown across the moat, I resumed my pilgrimage. [Illustration: Dervish.]