Higher up the valley, you generally meet with an encampment of Bedouin Arabs, where you are almost certain to see two or three faces of dark flashing beauty, which repay you for the annoyance that you experience from the importunity of the troop of children who assail you directly you approach the tents; little, ragged, merry-looking, vociferous urchins, of whom you cannot rid yourself either by bribes or menaces. These dark, proud beauties—for they are proud-looking, even amid their tatters, with their large, wild, black eyes, and their long raven hair plaited in many braids, which fall upon their shoulders, and hang below their waists; their round, smooth arms bare to the elbow, whence the large, hanging sleeves fall back; and their well-turned little feet peeping out from beneath their ample trowsers; these dark, proud beauties greet you with a smile, and a “Mashallah!” that introduce you to teeth like pearls, and voices like music; and as they sit, weaving their baskets for the market of Constantinople, they extend towards you their slender, henna-tipped fingers, and ask your piastres, without taking the trouble to rise, rather as a tribute to their loveliness, than as an offering to their necessities. To escape from the importunities of the children, whom the sight of the tempting metal renders only more importunate, you have but to plunge deeper into the valley, and lose yourself among the majestic plane trees with which it abounds. The nightingale alone disturbs the deep silence of the solitude, save when at intervals the lowing of the cattle on the mountain sweeps along upon the wind. It was here that De Lille wrote his “Pleasures of Imagination.”—It was here that De la Martine improvised to the memory of his daughter; the soil is poetic. CHAPTER XIII. Facts and Fictions—Female Execution at Constantinople—Crime of the Condemned—Tale of the Merchant’s Wife—The Call to Prayer—The Discovery—The Mother and Son—The Hiding-Place—The Capture—The Trial—A Night Scene in the Harem—The Morrow—Mercifulness of the Turks towards their Women. A vast deal of very romantic and affecting sentiment has been from time to time committed to paper, on the subject of the Turkish females drowned in the Bosphorus; and some tale-writers have even gone so far as to describe, in the character of witnesses, the extreme beauty and the heart-rending tears of the victims.