One by one, silently, the soldiers on guard at the Sublime Porte and a few neighbours have gotten up from sleep and made their way to the mosque. They make their ablution in the little courtyard: one must be clean to commune with God. They enter the mosque and I can see them through the open door. In unison and as one man they kneel, they prostrate themselves in adoration and then they rise and pray: arms extended, palms upwards--standing like Christ on the Mount of Olives. Allahi Ekber! God is Great! The prayer is finished. Perfect quiet again in Stamboul. The faithful have returned home. You can almost hear the world meditating. The mystic night unfolds its mysteries to the believers asleep. Complete silence, calm and relaxation. The Orient is dreaming. At dawn the muezzin will again call to prayer: “Allahi Ekber.” IX A NIGHT IN PERA Since our arrival in Constantinople we had heard of the night life in Pera but we had not seen it close to. Although we lived--out of necessity--in Pera during the first months of our return, we very seldom went out. In the Summer months and in the Fall we were in the country and since we had settled in Stamboul we loved too much our own quiet nights at home to seek anything else. But when my friend, Carayanni, suggested showing us Pera at night we decided that it was almost our duty to take advantage of this opportunity of seeing it with someone who knew the place. Since the armistice Pera is so full of amusement resorts of all kinds that unless one is guided by an “habitué” one is apt to get lost in more than one sense of the word. I think that I have already said that Pera is now inhabited by almost all the races of Europe with the exception of the Turks. The Turks have been forced out of this quarter and are certainly not keen to reenter it under its present conditions. Pera shelters all the foreigners in Constantinople, from the High Commissioners of the different nations and their immediate retinues down to the worst kind of adventurers and of course there are many more adventurers than High Commissioners. Pera shelters most of the Russian refugees, from poor helpless former nobles whose plight is a real disgrace to civilization down to the most resourcefully immoral individuals of both sexes whose behaviour is a real shame to humanity. In addition Pera shelters all the Greeks and Armenians of the city and its narrow, crooked streets are the playground and dwelling-place of a nondescript people which, for lack of better name, people have agreed to call “Levantines.”