About eight in the morning
I put a number of things into a pannier , went up again , found some of those exquisite pale cigarettes which drunken in the hollow of an emerald , also a jewelled two-yard-long chibouque , and tembaki : and with all descended by another stair , and laid them on the steps of a little raised kiosk of green marble in a corner of the court ; went up again , and brought down a still-snowy _ yatag _ to sleep on ; and there , by the kiosk-step , ate and passed the night , smoking for several hours in a state of languor . In the centre of the court is a square marble well , looking white through a rankness of wild vine , acacias in flower , weeds , jasmines , and roses , which overgrew it , as well as the kiosk and the whole court , climbing even the four-square arcade of Moorish arches round the open space , under one of which I had deposited a long lantern of crimson silk : for here no breath of the fire had come . About two in morning I fell to sleep , a deeper peace of shadow now reigning where so long the melancholy silver of the moon had lingered . * * * * * About eight in the morning I rose and made my way to the front , intending that that should be my last night in this ruined place : for all the night , sleeping and waking , the thing which had happened filled my brain , growing from one depth of incredibility to a deeper , so that at last I arrived at a sort of certainty that it could be nothing but a drunken dream : but as I opened my eyes afresh , the deep-cutting realisation of that impossibility smote like a pang of lightning-stroke through my being : and I said : ` I will go again to the far Orient , and forget ' : and I started out from the court , not knowing what had become of her during the night , till , having reached the outer chamber , with a wild start I saw her lying there at the door in the very spot where I had flung her , asleep sideways , head on arm ... Softly , softly , I stept over her , got out , and went running at a cautious clandestine trot . The morning was in high _ fête _ , most fresh and pure , and to breathe was to be young , and to see such a sunlight lighten even upon ruin so vast was to be blithe . After running two hundred yards to one of the great broken bazaar-portals , I looked back to see if I was followed : but all that space was desolately empty . I then walked on past the arch , on which a green oblong , once inscribed , as usual , with some text in gilt hieroglyphs , is still discernible ; and , emerging , saw the great panorama of destruction , a few vast standing walls , with hollow Oriental windows framing deep sky beyond , and here and there a pillar , or half-minaret , and down within the walls of the old Seraglio still some leafless , branchless trunks , and in Eyoub and Phanar leafless forests , and on the northern horizon Pera with the steep upper-half of the Iani-Chircha street still there , and on the height the European houses , and all between blackness , stones , a rolling landscape of ravine , like the hilly pack-ice of the North if its snow were ink , and to the right Scutari , black , laid low , with its vast region of tombs , and rare stumps of its forests , and the blithe blue sea , with the widening semicircle of floating _ débris _ , looking like brown foul scum at some points , congested before the bridgeless Golden Horn : for I stood pretty high in the centre of Stamboul somewhere in the region of the Suleimanieh , or of Sultan-Selim , as I judged , with immense purviews into abstract distances and mirage .