Seen on a summer morning from a window on the upper floor of the Pera Palace Hotel, the city presents a dazzling picture of kaleidoscopic beauty. We are several hundred feet above the level of the sea. It is early morn, and a thick grey fog conceals the waters of the Golden Horn as well as the land. Gradually, as if awakening from a dream, the sharp angles of prominent buildings, the tips of tall minarets, the curved outlines of stately mosques, emerge through the mist between clusters of dark cypresses, dotted in stray patches away to the horizon. The rays of the rising sun strike a few windows here and there. These glisten with a peculiar iridescence, as if lighted by electricity—peeping through the impenetrable haze still dimming the ground. Something ghost-like pervades the scene. Fancy conjures up the vain anger of Polyphemus, the deriding jeers of Ulysses. Rooks caw overhead as they circle through the air. Chanticleer crows on a patch of green meadow-land. Dogs bark with unwonted anger as three bears, led by their keepers, thread their way through the crowd—well accustomed to such sights. Resounding above all, the trumpet call from the Cavalry Barracks vibrates, mingling with the shouts of hawkers in the street. Fog-horns and the siren’s moan from ships at anchor swell the chorus, and between whiles the tinkling of bells of passing mules and horses is distinctly heard. Droves of black sheep, followed by Thracian shepherds in picturesque garb, and numbers of horses of Anatolian breed, ridden by barefooted boys, pass by. Amid this pandemonium, bricklayers are at work on the roof of a seven-storied building, run up in such primitive fashion that you wonder the whole structure does not collapse and bury them among its wreckage. Yet cobblers and tailors are unconcernedly plying their craft in the basement, completing a picture which, if witnessed on the stage or described in a story-book, would strike us as a fanciful realization of a mythical world. But lo! the sun! Mosques, minarets, and cypresses float out of the grey mist as it lifts slowly off land and water. Turkish ironclads become substantial things as they lie at anchor in the Golden Horn alongside the battered old wooden hulks of Navarino’s bloody memory. At first the iron prows only are visible, tipped with light. But as the sun grows more powerful and plays on the water, streaks of silver quiver serpent-like—a veritable Greek fire—round the hulls, until finally the ironclads themselves appear majestically before the vision like antediluvian monsters.