repetitions of the warning word "Death," written
with black ink and in some ancient upright Arabic
character, all over the map of Constantinople. I
grope up the Seraski Tower, where the fire watchmen
stare out of the windows night and day; still
I see everywhere those circumvironing cypresses,
those steadfast friends of death, the great nursery
gardener who is always busy sowing seed in
his silent garden. There they are, miles of
them, besieging the city walls from the Sea of
Marmora and the Seven Towers, right away to
the Blachernæ Palace and the Golden Horn; but
on the Sea of Marmora side, the old ramparts
come down too close to the green water to allow
of graves, and next them come the Seraglio
Gardens; while the warehouses and the littering
shops, and the Greek and Jew quarters, press too
closely on the third side of the triangle, and
verge so crowdingly to the shore, that in that
direction there remains no burying-place but
the Golden Horn itself and its waves.

To explain the city in a true geographical
manner, let me illustrate its shape by a simile.
It is like one of those sippets of bread that
garnish hashed mutton. The sharp point,
the beak, or nose, or promontory, is where
the Sultan's old disused palace and gardens
stand; the left-hand side is the long line of
wall washed by the Sea of Marmora; the base
of the triangle is the triple girdle of rampart
(miles long) with the Seven Towers at the one
end, and the Blachernæ Palace at the Golden
Horn extremity; and on this right-hand border of
the sippet flows the Horn itself, where the bridge
of boats joints Stamboul to the Frank quarter
of Galata. Opposite the sharp end of the
sippet, you must imagine Scutari sloping up
from the blue water's edge, with its thousands of
cypresses rearing their black lances; for the
Turk has a special love for the Asian land, and
will always be buried in Asia if he can afford it.

And now the spider critic, the man who reads
to discover faults, and runs mad on his logical
ladder if there is but a letter turned upside down
by the printer, thinks he has me, and wonders
how a four-sided city, or a three-sided city— "if
Stamboul is, as the gentleman says, a triangle"—
can be said to be surrounded with cypresses and
burial-grounds.

Stamboul, I repeat, is a city of live men,
walled in by dead men. It is true that the
old city of the Greeks has but one long side
closely hemmed in with the blockading cypresses,
but get tiptoe on the aforesaid airy crescent, and
you will see them reaching in rank and file, a
funeral army, everywhere all around, to the very
dip of the horizon. Over in Galata, across the
water, I see them, dark and close on the Grand
Champs and the Petit Champ, at Easter-time,
when the Greeks have their noisy musket-firing
holiday— places of drunken revel and tumult. I
see them low down on the hill, and also high up
close to where Mahmoud, Abdul Medjid's father,
used to practise archery with his Circassian
favourite. I see dark patches of terebinth-tree,
and plane, too, where the dervishes bury
their madmen, and where the Armenians rest
from cheating. I see the same dreary, one-idea'd
trees, one hundred thousand strong,
drawn up, even three miles away yonder,
on the slopes of Scutari, where they appear like
regiments of gravediggers, waiting, as vultures
wait, for the great Armageddon that is to clear the
once Christian city from the unimprovable Turk.
There were great burials when they came here
first, they say; there may well be sexton festivals
when they depart; great wrongs must have
great expiations, and the Archangel's sword,
from all I can see, is already ground sharp, ready
for the red harvest of turbaned believers in a
lying creed.

It was a Moslem custom, in the days of purer
faith and more ardent zeal for Mohammed, for
Turkish parents to plant a cypress-tree on the day
a child was given them; and again, on the day
of death, the children of the dead man planted
another tree on the head of his grave. It was
a custom not without poetry, and it accounts for
the great cypress forests that girdle the Sick
Man's city. It must have been an improving
occupation for serious moments, to have gone to
look at one's birthday-tree and to have marked
its green spire rising, rising, and its husky rind
swelling, swelling, reminding the Turk of Time's
flight, and of the summers that form our lives,
which Time plucks one by one, as an idler
does the red leaves of a rose he has grown
tired of; it would grow and become a home
for doves and a stiff harpstring for the
breezes of the Bosphorus; and it would grow
gold and ruby in daily sunsets, and a silver column
like a frozen fountain in nightly moonshine;
and then, when the birthday-tree had
distanced its human rival in the life race, and
grey hairs and infirm limbs had come to the old
man, there would be the cypress, still green,
fresh, and unscarred, contemptuously waiting
till the grave should open, and that other
tree, its young companion so long waited for,
should come to rise beside it, perhaps to outlive
its predecessor, and triumph in its turn
over death and decay. No burial or birth
trees are now planted round Stamboul, but the
forests reproduce themselves, and they spread
and widen, as Turkish conquest once spread
and widened, and as some day, perhaps, Christianity
will spread and widen over the Mohammedanism
which, since 1453, has kept it
under its Tartar foot. I never entered those
solemn cypress woods around Constantinople
without thinking how curiously they resembled
those dark forests where, centuries ago, Ptolemy
tells us, the nameless and despised Turkish
ancestors of the conquerors who slept beneath
my feet, dwelt, when they were mere half-naked
robber hunters who hid themselves in
woods round the Sea of Azof.

How often, in the hot hush of the day, sheltered
here by the very shadow of death, have I
sat under a turbaned head-stone, listening to
the motherly cooing of the doves, hoping that
some old Arab magician would come, and, sitting
down beside me, suddenly snatch a serpent
gliding through the crocus flowers, turn it into