The pavement as well as the middle of the streets showed big patches of blood, proving that the massacres, which apparently had started among the harbour population of Galata and Stamboul, had spread to the heights of Pera. I took a walk through the Grande Rue de Pera and the adjoining thoroughfares, in which every shop was closed, but did not meet a soul. Had it not been for the dogs, which struck me as being unusually depressed, Constantinople might have been a deserted city, and this state of things lasted for several days. Such was the tension of nerves that when I returned to the hotel I found the messenger boy who had shown me the way to the telegraph office near the British Embassy, and whom I had subsequently lost sight of, in tears. He had spread the report that I had been murdered. As a matter of fact no Europeans ran any appreciable risk of harm during those days, except, perhaps, through the accident of an Armenian bomb exploding in the street in their immediate vicinity. At night a table was placed in the hall of the hotel, on which were placed a number of revolvers, so that each guest might take one up to his room, and have a weapon with which to defend himself. But for the dull thud of the bekdji’s (night watch) wooden staff striking the pavement an uncanny stillness prevailed, as of a dead city. During that night and the subsequent ones the dead were taken in carts past our hotel and hastily interred in the Armenian cemetery on the way to Tschishly. Early next morning I went out with the correspondent of the _Times_. We visited the Ottoman Bank, from whence the Armenian conspirators had, only a few hours before, been taken away. Everything was in the greatest disorder. Pools of blood on the first floor and in the basement remained as evidence of what had taken place during the previous twenty-four hours. We were shown a heap of blood-stained coins. On the second floor we saw a table still littered with the remnants of the last meal of the Armenians. The staff of the Bank had escaped through the roof when the Armenians made their attack. We thence wended our way to the Galata Bridge, upon which dense crowds had congregated, the Turkish guard being doubled at the head of the bridge, the wooden planks of which were dotted with a spray of blood spots. In the afternoon a friend took me to a house near the Galata Tower. We climbed up to the roof, from which we obtained a bird’s-eye view of the harbour, and saw a crowd rushing from all directions towards the quay—apparently on the alert to renew the outbreak.