Any one whose gaze could have pierced through those different roofs and domes would have looked upon many a contrasting scene. In one apartment a sultana, leaning against the window, gazes mournfully between the satin curtains at the blue mountains of Asia, thinking, possibly, of her husband, a handsome young pasha, governor of a distant province, who, in accordance with a certain practice, had been torn from her arms after six short months of happiness, so that he might have no sons. In another small room, entirely lined with marble and looking-glasses, a pretty fifteen-year-old _kadyn_, who expects to receive a visit from the Pâdishah during the day, is frolicking with the slaves who are engaged in perfuming and anointing her, setting off her charms to the very best advantage, and raising little flattering choruses of delight and surprise at every fresh revelation of her beauty. Youthful sultanas run up and down the walled gardens, chasing each other around gleaming marble basins filled with goldfish, and making the shells with which the paths are laid rattle beneath their tiny flying feet encased in white satin slippers; others, shrinking back in the farthest corner of darkened rooms with pale set faces and averted looks, seem to be brooding over some act of despair or revenge. In one apartment, hung with rich brocades, children who from the hour of their birth have been condemned to death nestle upon satin cushions striped with gold beneath walls of mother-of-pearl; beautiful princesses lave their shapely limbs in baths of Paros marble; _gheduclùs_ lie stretched full length upon rugs fast asleep; groups of slaves and servants and eunuchs pass back and forth through covered galleries and dim corridors and secret stairways and passages; and everywhere curious faces peering from behind grated windows, mute signs interchanged between terrace and garden, furtive signals from behind half-drawn curtains, low conversations carried on in monosyllables in the shadow of a wall or archway, broken by a ripple of half-suppressed laughter, followed by the swish of feminine garments and patter of flying slippers dying away among those cloister-like walls.