The streets of Tophaneh were crowded with swarms of Turks, Greeks and Armenians.  The square around the fountain was brilliantly lighted, and venders of sherbet and kaimak were ranged along the sidewalks.  In the neighborhood of the mosque the crowd was so dense that we could with difficulty make our way through.  All the open space next the water was filled up with the clumsy arabas, or carriages of the Turks, in which sat the wives of the Pashas and other dignitaries.

We took a caique, and were soon pulled out into the midst of a multitude of other caiques, swarming all over the surface of the Golden Horn.  The view from this point was strange, fantastic, yet inconceivably gorgeous.  In front, three or four large Turkish frigates lay in the Bosphorus, their hulls and spars outlined in fire against the dark hills and distant twinkling lights of Asia.  Looking to the west, the shores of the Golden Horn were equally traced by the multitude of lamps that covered them, and on either side, the hills on which the city is built rose from the water—­masses of dark buildings, dotted all over with shafts and domes of the most brilliant light.  The gateway on Seraglio Point was illuminated, as well as the quay in front of the mosque of Tophaneh, all the cannons of the battery being covered with lamps.  The commonest objects shared in the splendor, even a large lever used for hoisting goods being hung with lanterns from top to bottom.  The mosque was a mass of light, and between the tall minarets flanking it, burned the inscription, in Arabic characters, “Long life to you, O our Sovereign!”

The discharge of a cannon announced the Sultan’s departure from his palace, and immediately the guns on the frigates and the batteries on both shores took up the salute, till the grand echoes, filling the hollow throat of the Golden Horn, crashed from side to side, striking the hills of Scutari and the point of Chalcedon, and finally dying away among the summits of the Princes’ Islands, out on the Sea of Marmora.  The hulls of the frigates were now lighted up with intense chemical fires, and an abundance of rockets were spouted from their decks.  A large Drummond light on Seraglio Point, and another at the Battery of Tophaneh, poured their rival streams across the Golden Horn, revealing the thousands of caiques jostling each other from shore to shore, and the endless variety of gay costumes with which they were filled.  The smoke of the cannon hanging in the air, increased the effect of this illumination, and became a screen of auroral brightness, through which the superb spectacle loomed with large and unreal features.  It was a picture of air—­a phantasmagoric spectacle, built of luminous vapor and meteoric fires, and hanging in the dark round of space.  In spite of ourselves, we became eager and excited, half fearing that the whole pageant would dissolve the next moment, and leave no trace behind.