Taking the road again and skirting the walls of Stambul, I walked toward the sea, passing close by the Adrianopolis station. Here several railroad lines cross each other, and I found myself among a number of long strings of dusty, travel-stained-looking cars. No one was in sight, and had I been one of those fanatic Turks hostile to all European innovations, I might easily have set fire, one after another, to all those cars, and then proceeded leisurely on my way quite unmolested. Starting to walk along the track, I expected every moment to hear the cry of some guard or other warning me off the premises, but nothing of the sort happened, and before long I reached the end of the land-walls, where I supposed I would be able to enter Stambul. In this, however, I was doomed to disappointment. The sea- and land-walls join each other on the shore without any sign of gateway; so, climbing a ruined mole which runs out into the water at this point, I seated myself on a large stone and proceeded to look about me. In front lay the Sea of Marmora, beyond which rose the mountains of Asia, and farther still the blue heights of Skutari, looking very far away indeed. The shore was utterly deserted, and I seemed to occupy the universe alone. The waves broke at my feet, dashing their spray up into my face. I sat there for some time, turning over all manner of vague fancies in my mind: first, I saw myself come out of the Caligarian Gate and proceed slowly down the deserted road between the towers and cemeteries--a lonely figure, which I followed with some curiosity as though it had been some one else; then I amused myself with trying to trace out Yunk through the mazes of the great city; then I watched the waves as one after another they broke upon the shore with a murmuring sound, and one after another melted away in silence, seeing in them a figure of all those peoples and armies which from age to age had successfully hurled themselves against the walls of Byzantium. The phalanxes of Pausanius and Alcibiades, the legions of Maximus and Severus, the Persian bands and hordes of Avars, and the Sclavs, Arabs, Bulgarians, and Croats, the armies of Michael Palæologus and Comnenus, and those of Bayezid Ilderim, of the second Murad, and of Muhammad the Conqueror, vanished one after another into the infinite silence of death, until I felt the same vague, oppressed sensation of melancholy as that which swept over the soul of Leopardi in the “_Sera del di’ di Festa_” when the solitary song of the laborer died away little by little, speaking to him with the voice of the ancient peoples, reminding him that everything on earth must pass away like the shadow of a dream.