seven o'clock
`` It was through the cool mist of the morning that I got my first glimpse of the city of which I had heard so much . Santa Sophia , rising like some beautiful dream-structure , with the points of its four light , airy , minarets flashing in the sunlight . Then , little by little , kiosks , tall sad-looking cypresses , sycamores , and the other thousand-and-one wonders of that city of beautiful and revolting contradictions , took shape and form . `` By seven o'clock we were in the heart of the city , and breakfasting . My captor had treated me with a certain rough kindness through all the journey , and done his best to hearten me . He had told me my fate -- to be sold into a harem -- but he had pictured it as glowingly , as glitteringly as his rough eloquence would let him . And , with all the blood of countless centuries of Eastern races coursing in my veins , and in the more or less stunned , stupified condition in which that awful night-tragedy had left me , I yielded , for the time , to the fatalism with which we Easterns are familiarized from our babyhood .