"A dense and motionless cloud of stagnant vapours ever shrouds these dreary realms. From afar, a chilling sensation informs the traveller that he approaches their dark and dismal precincts; and as he enters them, an icy blast, rising from their inmost bosom, rushes forth to meet his breath, suddenly strikes his chest, and seems to oppose his progress. His very horse snuffs up the deadly effluvia with signs of manifest terror, and, exhaling a cold and clammy sweat, advances reluctantly over a hollow ground, which shakes as he treads it, and loudly re-echoes his slow and fearful step. So long and so busily has time been at work to fill this chosen spot--so repeatedly has Constantinople poured into this ultimate receptacle almost its whole contents--that the capital of the living, spite of its immense population, scarcely counts a single breathing inhabitant for every ten silent inmates of this city of the dead. Already do its fields of blooming sepulchres stretch far away on every side, across the brow of the hills and the bend of the valleys; already are the avenues which cross each other at every step in this domain of death, so lengthened, that the weary stranger, from whatever point he comes, still finds before him many a dreary mile of road between marshalled tombs and mournful cypresses, ere he reaches his journey's seemingly receding end; and yet, every year does this common patrimony of all the heirs to decay, still exhibit a rapidly increasing size, a fresh and wider line of boundary, and a new belt of young plantations, growing up between new flower beds of graves. "There, said I to myself, lie, scarcely one foot beneath the surface of a swelling soil, ready to burst at every point with its festering contents, more than half the generations whom death has continued to mow down for nearly four centuries in the vast capital of Islamism. There lie, side by side, on the same level, in cells the size of their bodies, and only distinguished by a marble turban somewhat longer or deeper--somewhat rounder or squarer--personages, in life, far as heaven and earth asunder, in birth, in station, in gifts of nature, and in long laboured acquirements. There lie, sunk alike in their last sleep--alike food for the worm that lives on death--the conqueror who filled the universe with his name, and the peasant scarcely known in his own hamlet; Sultan Mahmoud, and Sultan Mahmoud's perhaps more deserving horse;[4] elders bending under the weight of years, and infants of a single hour; men with intellects of angels, and men with understandings inferior to those of brutes; the beauty of Georgia and the black of Sennaar; visiers, beggars, heroes, and women.'" The approach to Constantinople from the sea of Marmora is likewise thus beautifully described by the same author, and will form an appropriate conclusion: