Sultan Orcan, with his wife Kilikia, two of his Odaliques, and seventeen of his children, occupy the centre of the floor; whose fine mosaic pavement has been covered throughout the whole space thus appropriated with a mass of coarse plaister, raised about a foot from the floor, and supporting the Sarcophagi. That of the Sultan himself is overlaid with a costly cachemire shawl, above which are spread two richly embroidered handkerchiefs in crimson and green, worked with gold; while the turban at its head is decorated with a third, wrought in beautiful arabesques, and by far the most splendid thing of the kind that I ever saw, Those of the Sultanas and their children are simply painted of the sacred green, and totally unornamented; the first instance of such a marked distinction that I had yet met with in the country. At the upper end of the chapel, three rows of marble seats, arranged amphitheatrically, occupy the extremity of the oval immediately opposite to the altar, and are surmounted by a centre seat, supposed to have been that from which the monarch was accustomed to hear the mass, while his nobles placed themselves on the benches at his feet. The lofty dome is supported by six gigantic square pillars of masonry, and the marbles that line the walls are inserted with considerable taste. In one of the side arches a cross still remains, which was introduced among the mosaics by the Greeks; but a second, of much larger dimensions, which surmounted their altar, has been destroyed, and the space that it occupied coarsely covered with plaister. On the left-hand side of the Imperial Sarcophagus hangs a small wooden case, shaped like a bird-cage, and covered with green silk, containing the Sultan’s beard!—the precious relic of five centuries! The Mausoleum of Sultan Ali Osman, the son of Orcan, which occupies the other wing of the building, contains no object of particular interest; the Hall of Sepulchre is similar in material and in arrangement, save that the Sarcophagi of his wives and children are simply whitewashed. The modern Emperors have been more gallant; and many a deceased Sultana sleeps the last sleep at Constantinople, covered with shawls which, during the rage for cachemeres in Paris, would have killed half the _élégantes_ with envy.