of the city. Turning aside, they made their way thither
over terraces partly in the rock, partly on the roofs of houses.

Fierce-looking Janissaries, splendidly equipped, guarded the entrance,
with an air so proud and consequential as to remind Arthur of poor
Yusuf's assurances of the magnificence that might await little Ulysse as
an Aga of that corps. Even as they admitted the infidels they looked
defiance at them from under the manifold snowy folds of their mighty
turbans.

{The pirate city: p0.jpg}

If the beauty of the consuls' houses had struck and startled Arthur, far
more did the region into which he was now admitted seem like a dream of
fairyland as he passed through ranks of orange trees round sparkling
fountains--worthy of Versailles itself--courts surrounded with cloisters,
sparkling with priceless mosaics, in those brilliant colours which
Eastern taste alone can combine so as to avoid gaudiness, arches and
columns of ineffable grace and richness, halls with domes emulating the
sky, or else ceiled with white marble lacework, whose tracery seemed
delicate and varied as the richest Venice point! But the wonderful
beauty seemed to him to have in it something terrible and weird, like
that fairyland of his native country, whose glory and charm is
overshadowed by the knowledge of the teinds to be paid to hell. It was
an unnatural, incomprehensible world; and from longing to admire and
examine, he only wished to be out of it, felt it a relief to fix his eyes
upon the uniforms of the captain and the consuls, and did not wonder that
Ulysse, instead of proudly heading the procession, shrank up to him and
clasped his hand as his protector.

The human figures were as strange as the architecture; the glittering of
Janissaries in the outer court, which seemed a sort of guardroom, the
lines of those on duty in the next, and in the third court the black
slaves in white garments, enhancing the blackness of their limbs, each
with a formidable curved scimitar. At the golden cusped archway beyond,
all had to remove their shoes as though entering a mosque. The Consuls
bade the new-comers submit to this, adding that it was only since the
recent victory that it had not been needful to lay aside the sword on
entering the Dey's august presence. The chamber seemed to the eyes of
the strangers one web of magic splendour--gold-crusted lacework above,
arches on one side open to a beauteous garden, and opposite semicircles
of r