Throughout all the towers, and parts of the walls themselves, is a network of dark corridors, secret stairways, low, ponderous doors secured with heavy bars and beams, beneath which many a haughty head of pasha or chamberlain, governor or imperial prince, has bent for the last time, hurled in the flower and vigor of youth from the height of power and success to a dark and ignominious death, their life-blood often staining the castle-walls, while their wives, arrayed in their richest robes, wondered as they sat expectantly amid the splendors of the harem why their lord delayed his coming. Along those narrow passage-ways reeking with moisture, down those steep, uneven stairs, soldiers and executioners with blood-stained hands have passed by night, guided by the uncertain rays of a lantern, or messengers from the Seraglio bringing a faint tantalizing gleam of hope to some poor wretch or else the final “No” of the Sultan, and dead bodies with staring eyes and the horrible silken cord still hanging from the neck been carried in the arms of panting sciaus, exhausted with their long silent struggle in the dim, uncertain light with the fury born of despair. [Illustration: View from Interior of the Seven Towers.] At the opposite end from Stambul, on the Seraglio Hill, was that terrible Tribunal of the Court, and hard by it the huge executioner’s machine, surmounted by seven great stone gallows, to which living victims were transported by sea and land to be offered up beneath the moon, and brought forth again into the sunlight, mere heads and trunks; from the heights of the tower beside it, in which he was to die, the lonely prisoner could see by night the brilliant lights of the Seraglio where the imperial kiosks were all illuminated for a fête. It gives one a positive sensation of pleasure to see that infamous pile so transformed, as though all its victims, unable to revenge themselves on man, had come to life again on purpose to rend and tear it with teeth and nails. The mighty monster, decrepit and disarmed, gapes with its hundred mouths of ruined doorways and disused loopholes, a mere empty scarecrow, while rats, snakes, and yellow scorpions eat like worms at its very vitals and swarm through its great spent body, and an insolent vegetation decks it out as if in mockery with leafy garlands and radiant bloom. After glancing in through several doorways, and seeing nothing but flying troops of rats, I mounted a grass-grown stair leading to one of the curtains on the western side, whence a view can be had of the entire building--a vast extent of ruined towers and battlements, stairways and ramparts, dark red or blackened with age, surrounding a mass of vivid green, and beyond them more towers and battlements, stretching on, on, on, belonging to the eastern walls of Stambul; so that by half closing the eyes one seems to be looking out over one prodigious abandoned fortress outlined against the blue waters