We visited the Thousand and One Columns.  I do not know what it was originally intended for, but they said it was built for a reservoir.  It is situated in the centre of Constantinople.  You go down a flight of stone steps in the middle of a barren place, and there you are.  You are forty feet under ground, and in the midst of a perfect wilderness of tall, slender, granite columns, of Byzantine architecture.  Stand where you would, or change your position as often as you pleased, you were always a centre from which radiated a dozen long archways and colonnades that lost themselves in distance and the sombre twilight of the place.  This old dried-up reservoir is occupied by a few ghostly silk-spinners now, and one of them showed me a cross cut high up in one of the pillars.  I suppose he meant me to understand that the institution was there before the Turkish occupation, and I thought he made a remark to that effect; but he must have had an impediment in his speech, for I did not understand him.

We took off our shoes and went into the marble mausoleum of the Sultan Mahmoud, the neatest piece of architecture, inside, that I have seen lately.  Mahmoud’s tomb was covered with a black velvet pall, which was elaborately embroidered with silver; it stood within a fancy silver railing; at the sides and corners were silver candlesticks that would weigh more than a hundred pounds, and they supported candles as large as a man’s leg; on the top of the sarcophagus was a fez, with a handsome diamond ornament upon it, which an attendant said cost a hundred thousand pounds, and lied like a Turk when he said it.  Mahmoud’s whole family were comfortably planted around him.

We went to the great Bazaar in Stamboul, of course, and I shall not describe it further than to say it is a monstrous hive of little shops —­thousands, I should say—­all under one roof, and cut up into innumerable little blocks by narrow streets which are arched overhead.  One street is devoted to a particular kind of merchandise, another to another, and so on.

When you wish to buy a pair of shoes you have the swing of the whole street—­you do not have to walk yourself down hunting stores in different localities.  It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc.  The place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing.  It is full of life, and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, dervishes, high-born Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces —­and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce.  The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink.  Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral.  They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives.  This almost amounts to bigamy.  It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey.  We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.