Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/59

 Stambul with Seraglio Point, Galata, and Pera, like distant Scutari on the Asiatic side, were soon gliding astern in the vanishing panorama, and their place was quickly taken by the first of that brilliant series of triumphs of Eastern and "Western architecture which line the shores of the Bosporus Strait. First the snowy sheen of the Dolma Baghtchah Palace, a seraglio built half a century ago by Sultan Abd al-Majid, flashed into view. Beyond it, clear mirrored in the blue Bosporus, rose the marble fagade of Cheraghan, a sumptuous sarai erected at fabulous expense by Sultan Abd al-Aziz, in 1867 (since burned, in 1911) ; and its brilliant image, stretching, with the adjacent princely palaces, for nearly half a mile along the water front, seemed to reflect the magnifi- cence of its forbidden interior. Then, from the hill crest back of both these palaces of dreams, there peered out from the emerald of its leafy surroundings the less ostentatious but more famous Yildiz Kiosk, the abode of the now deposed Sultan Abd al-Hamid II. The fortunes of this palace, whose renown the hand of fame has tarnished rather than burnished, have all been changed — changed with the changes of the times rung in by the revolution of 1908.

Our steamer is by this time well up the Bosporus. This famous strait of water, which is sometimes only a little more than a mile broad, sometimes even scarcely half that width, calls up a host of classic and Oriental associations along the eighteen miles of its banks. Gossip, old as Olympus, has never failed to repeat the fabulous tale of how Zeus, in the form of a bull, crossed its waters v,^hen pursuing the beauteous but frenzied lo, transformed into a heifer; and talebearing legend has perpetuated the myth in the fanciful etymology of Bos-poros as Ox-ford. But enough of myth and legend I From the realm of history we know that not only vandal Goths and consecrated Crusaders have crossed its narrow channel, but Herodotus tells us that the great Darius led his Persian hosts across it on a bridge of boats in 513 B.C., when

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