Passing beneath the gateway, you enter the second court, and begin to breathe more unmistakably the sacred atmosphere which surrounded the lord “of the two seas and two worlds.” Entering there for the first time, one pauses involuntarily on the threshold, held back by feelings of awe and veneration and fear. It was a huge, irregular courtyard, a sort of enormous open hall, surrounded by graceful buildings with gold and silver domes: here and there were groups of tall trees, while two avenues crossed each other, flanked by great cypresses. All around it ran a low gallery, supported on graceful marble columns and protected by a spreading roof covered with lead. To the left as you enter was the hall of the Divân, surmounted by a glittering dome, and beyond it the reception chamber, before which stood six huge columns of Marmora marble supporting a wide roof with undulating border. Bases and capitals, walls, roofs, doorways, arches, all were embossed, carved, chiselled, painted, and gilded, and as light and graceful as pavilions made of lace and encrusted with gems, while a group of superb plane trees cast their shadows over it all. On the other side were the apartments where the robes of state were kept, the archives, the tents, the residence of the chief of the black eunuchs, and the kitchens of the court. Here was to be found that intendant on whom far more devolved than on one of the ministers of state, under whom were employed fifty sub-lieutenants and a whole army of cooks, supplemented on great occasions by chefs collected from every corner of the empire. On the days of the Divân, dinner was served here for all the viziers, and, when such functions as imperial weddings or circumcisions were in progress, were prepared those far-famed pastry gardens, sugar swans, giraffes, falcons, and camels; and roasted sheep from which flocks of birds issued, to be carried later on in great pomp to the Hippodrome square; here too were manufactured those sweetmeats of every conceivable form and flavor designed to melt away in the thousand greedy little mouths of the harem. On fête-days eight hundred workmen swarmed close by the kitchens, occupied in getting out the Sultan’s tents and those of the harem, which they were to erect all about the Seraglio gardens and on the hillsides overlooking the Bosphorus; and when even these apparently inexhaustible storehouses gave out, pavilions were constructed from the sails of the fleet, and cypress trees taken up by the roots from the gardens of the imperial villas.