Looking at it from the road, the walls hide all but two of the great towers which gave it its name, only four of which are now standing. Two Corinthian columns indicate the ancient Golden Gate through which Heraclius and Narsetes made their triumphal entry: according to a legend common to Turk and Greek alike, it is through this gate that the Christians will come on that day when they once more take possession of the City of Constantine. A postern beneath a small square tower gives admittance to the interior, and the sentinel in slippers who drowses without usually permits the simultaneous entry of a visitor into the castle and a coin into his pocket. This successfully accomplished, I found myself in a large enclosure combining lugubriously the aspect of a cemetery with that of a prison. All around rose massive blackened walls, forming a pentagon crowned by heavy towers, square and round, high and low, some tottering to pieces, others intact and topped by high conical roofs, overlaid with lead; innumerable flights of half-ruined stairs led to the battlements and loopholes. A thick, tangled growth of vegetation was overshadowed by a group of cypress and plane trees, above whose summits the minaret of a little mosque could be seen, and beneath, half hidden by the undergrowth, a group of small huts occupied by the soldiers; in the centre of the enclosure stood the tomb of a vizier strangled in the castle; here and there appeared traces of an ancient redoubt, while beneath the underbrush and along the walls were fragments of bas-reliefs, shafts of broken columns, and capitals half buried in the earth and covered with moss and slime--a strange, melancholy chaos, forbidding and oppressive, which made me hesitate about exploring farther. After a momentary indecision, however, I proceeded, circumspectly though, as if afraid that a false step might land me in a pool of blood. The huts were shut up, the mosque closed--everything as still and solitary as in some abandoned ruin. On the walls may still be found traces of Greek crosses, the Constantinian monogram, the spread wings of the Roman eagle, and discolored bits of the decorations of the earlier Byzantine building. Some rough inscriptions on the stones in minute Greek characters bear witness to the presence of Constantine’s soldiers stationed here under the command of the Florentine Giuliani to defend the citadel; they were evidently executed on the day preceding the fall of Constantinople, and the poor fellows, reconciled to death for themselves, request only that Heaven may preserve their city from pillage and their families from slavery. One of the two towers flanking the rear of the Golden Gate is the dungeon tower, in which the sultan used to confine ambassadors from those countries with which he was at war: a number of Latin inscriptions may be seen upon the walls traced by the hands of the prisoners, the most recent being those of the Venetian envoys