eather
A Young Man in a Hurry
The Green Mouse
Iole
The Mystery of Choice
The Cambric Mask
The Maker of Moons
The King in Yellow
In Search of the Unknown
The Conspiritors
A King and a Few Dukes
In the Quarter
Outsiders

PROLOGUE

CLAIRE-DE-LUNE

There was a big moon over the Bosphorus; the limpid waters off
Seraglio Point glimmered; the Golden Horn was like a sheet of beaten
silver inset with topaz and ruby where lanterns on rusting Turkish
warships dyed the tarnished argent of the flood. Except for these, and
the fixed lights on the foreign guard-ships and on a big American
steam yacht, only a pale and nebulous shoreward glow betrayed the
monster city.

Over Pera the full moon's lustre fell, silvering palace, villa, sea
and coast; its rays glimmered on bridge and wharf, bastion, tower
arsenal, and minarette, transforming those big, sprawling, ramshackle
blotches of architecture called Constantinople into that shadowy,
magnificent enchantment of the East, which all believe in, but which
exists only in a poet's heart and mind.

Night veiled the squalour of Balat, and its filth, its meanness, its
flimsy sham. Moonlight made of Galata a marvel, ennobling every
bastard dome, every starved facade, every unlovely and attenuated
minarette, and invested with added charm each really lovely ruin, each
tower, palace, mosque, garden wall and balcony, and every crenelated
battlement, where the bronze bulk of ancient cannon slanted, outlined
in silver under the Prophet's moon.

Tiny moving lights twinkled on the Galata Bridge; pale points of
radiance dotted Scutari; but the group of amazing cities called
Constantinople lay almost blotted out under the moon.

Darker at night than any capital in the world, its huge, solid and
ancient shapes bulking gigantic in the night, its noble ruins cloaked,
its cheap filth hidden, its flimsy Coney Island aspect transfigured
and the stylographic-pen architecture of a hundred minarettes softened
into slender elegance, Constantinople lay dreaming its immemorial
dreams under the black shadow of the Prussian eagle.

* * * * *

The German Embassy was lighted up like a Pera cafe; the drawing-rooms
crowded with a brilliant throng where sashes, orders, epaulettes and
sabre-tache glittered, and jewels blazed and aigrettes waved under the
crystal chandeliers, accenting and isolating sombre civilian evening
dress, which seemed