CHAPTER X
In Constantinople as one of the Victors
_T
HE steward called me late and the dawn was
already coming up grey before I was on deck
to watch the ship plough her way up the
Dardanelles.   The rocky shores stood out ragged and
raw, uninviting, quite unfriendly and menacing.    The
last day's heat lay heavy in the stony valleys, and there
came down the stale smell that spoke of dust and flies.
A hawk wheeled out as he hunted early,   A wedge of
duck fleeted past.   Here and there were tired villages,
just waking to the day.
We swung into the Sea of Marmora as the sun rose
on our right. Before us in the spring morning the sea
lay still in exquisite blue. As the dawn broke it left the
Islands of the Princes pearl-grey in the shadow of night
and tipped their peaks with gold. Behind us in great
patches of sun and deep shadow, their feet draped in a
gentle mist, the Anatolian hills climbed steep up into the
mountains of Asia till they reached the everlasting snows
of Olympus, towering sheer into the sky. Before us,
glittering in the dawn, lay Constantinople, and Stambul
the Turkish city, called in Arabic " The Gate of De-
light/* It was a mass of minarets and mosques, red-
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