“Turning aside,” says Mrs. Haweis, “from the foot of the stairs, we pass through peacock-green arches, with deep gold incisions, into the third Hall, called of Narcissus, which strikes a full deep chord of colour, and deepens the impression of antique magnificence. A bronze statuette of the fair son of Cephisus, from that in the Naples Museum, stands in the midst of it. Here the walls are deepest sea-blue tiles, that shades make dark; the floor is pallid (the well-known mosaic of the Cæsars’ palaces), and casts up shimmering reflected lights upon the greeny-silver ceiling, like water itself. The delicate tracery of the lattices brought bodily from the East, and which rise to right and left, having the complexity and colour of the skeleton of a leaf, and guarded by glass outside; the fine alhacen of carved wood which lines the central alcove facing us, with its four rare Persian enamels of women’s figures, and its shelves of Persian plates; the brilliant little windows that break the sunshine into scarlet and gold and azure flame; the snow-white columns of marble that stand against red at every angle; the fountain that patters and sings in its pool of chrysolite water--most perfect colophon to all the colours and the outer heat. We wander round and enjoy the toss of its one white jet from a bed of water wherein descending ridges, step-wise, have the semblance of the emerald facets of a great green stone. “The hall takes the form of a Greek cross, with slender columns as aforesaid at the angles, set against rose-red slabs. But the entrance is flanked with columns of a larger girth, made of red marble, with golden capitals. The walls are lined with Syrian azulejos of soft and varying blue and white arranged in panels, surmounted by a broad frieze, as yet unfinished, designed by Walter Crane, in a beautiful running pattern of fawns and vines, carried out in gold Venice mosaic. Above it rise courses of black and white marble, and above again the golden dome. “Over the entrance we see the overhanging black of the Zenana we have not yet visited, that Eastern nest that juts like a closed-in balcony high up the wall. Between it and the doorway lies a great purple panel blazoned with a verse of the _Koran_ in Arabic, and through the arch we see the distant staircase winding beyond the purple shadows of the intervening hall.” The studio itself is of a business-like, practical sort, though it is stored with choice treasures and inspiring bits of antique colour. In short, the artistic feeling of the accomplished man who prompted the whole is felt everywhere. There is a good deal of the “peacock blue,” and other colouring that combines with it. This somewhat “barbaric” scheme of colour is scarcely suited to our country; and the rich tint is likely enough to fade, or grow darker and yet darker, with time. We select this studio as a typical one, though it exceeds its fellows in magnificence and eastern _luxe_.[30]