.. Softly, softly, I stept
over her, got out, and went running at a cautious clandestine trot. The
morning was in high _fete_, most fresh and pure, and to breathe was to
be young, and to see such a sunlight lighten even upon ruin so vast was
to be blithe. After running two hundred yards to one of the great broken
bazaar-portals, I looked back to see if I was followed: but all that
space was desolately empty. I then walked on past the arch, on which a
green oblong, once inscribed, as usual, with some text in gilt
hieroglyphs, is still discernible; and, emerging, saw the great panorama
of destruction, a few vast standing walls, with hollow Oriental windows
framing deep sky beyond, and here and there a pillar, or half-minaret,
and down within the walls of the old Seraglio still some leafless,
branchless trunks, and in Eyoub and Phanar leafless forests, and on the
northern horizon Pera with the steep upper-half of the Iani-Chircha
street still there, and on the height the European houses, and all
between blackness, stones, a rolling landscape of ravine, like the hilly
pack-ice of the North if its snow were ink, and to the right Scutari,
black, laid low, with its vast region of tombs, and rare stumps of its
forests, and the blithe blue sea, with the widening semicircle of
floating _debris_, looking like brown foul scum at some points,
congested before the bridgeless Golden Horn: for I stood pretty high in
the centre of Stamboul somewhere in the region of the Suleimanieh, or of
Sultan-Selim, as I judged, with immense purviews into abstract distances
and mirage.
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