with exploding battleships, Turkish frigates, corvettes, brigs—­and east, with tens of thousands of feluccas, caiques, gondolas and merchantmen aflame.  On my left burned all Scutari; and between six and eight in the evening I had sent out thirty-seven vessels under low horse-powers of air, with trains and fuses laid for 11 P.M., to light with their wandering fires the Sea of Marmora.  By midnight I was encompassed in one great furnace and fiery gulf, all the sea and sky inflamed, and earth a-flare.  Not far from me to the left I saw the vast Tophana barracks of the Cannoniers, and the Artillery-works, after long reluctance and delay, take wing together; and three minutes later, down by the water, the barrack of the Bombardiers and the Military School together, grandly, grandly; and then, to the right, in the valley of Kassim, the Arsenal:  these occupying the sky like smoky suns, and shedding a glaring day over many a mile of sea and land; I saw the two lines of ruddier flaring where the barge-bridge and the raft-bridge over the Golden Horn made haste to burn; and all that vastness burned with haste, quicker and quicker—­to fervour—­to fury—­to unanimous rabies:  and when its red roaring stormed the infinite, and the might of its glowing heart was Gravitation, Being, Sensation, and I its compliant wife—­then my head nodded, and with crooked lips I sighed as it were my last sigh, and tumbled, weak and drunken, upon my face.

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O wild Providence!  Unfathomable madness of Heaven! that ever I should write what now I write!  I will not write it....

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The hissing of it!  It is only a crazy dream! a tearing-out of the hair by the roots to scatter upon the raving storms of Saturn!  My hand will not write it!

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In God’s name——!  During four nights after the burning I slept in a house—­French as I saw by the books, &c., probably the Ambassador’s, for it has very large gardens and a beautiful view over the sea, situated on the rapid east declivity of Pera; it is one of the few large houses which, for my safety, I had left standing round the minaret whence I had watched, this minaret being at the top of the old Mussulman quarter on the heights of Taxim, between Pera proper and Foundoucli.  At the bottom, both at the quay of Foundoucli, and at that of Tophana, I had left under shelter two caiques for double safety, one a Sultan’s gilt craft, with gold spur at the prow, and one a boat of those zaptias that used to patrol the Golden Horn as water-police:  by one or other of these I meant to reach the Speranza, she being then safely anchored some distance up the Bosphorus coast.  So, on the fifth morning I set out for the Tophana quay; but a light rain had fallen over-night, and this had re-excited the thin grey smoke resembling quenched steam, which, as from some