de no social attempt to entertain his
companion. Had she not just said to him that long ago they had gone
beyond all the silly little things that worry the fools? In the midst
of the fierce activity and the riot of noise which marks out the
Golden Horn from all other water-ways, they traveled towards emptiness,
silence, the desolation on the hill near the sacred place of the Turks,
where each new Sultan is girded with the sword of Osman, and where the
standard-bearer of the Prophet sleeps in the tomb that was seen in a
vision.

In the strong heat of noon they left the caique and walked slowly
towards the hill which rises to the north-east, where the dark towers of
the cypresses watch over the innumerable graves. Mrs. Clarke had put up
a sun umbrella. Her face was protected by a thin white veil. She wore a
linen dress, pale gray in color, with white lines on it, and long
loose gloves of suede. She looked extraordinarily thin. Her unshining,
curiously colorless hair was partly covered by a small hat of burnt
straw, turned sharply and decisively up on the left side and trimmed
with a broad riband of old gold. Dion remembered that he had thought of
her once as a vision seen in water. Now he was with her in the staring
definite clearness of a land dried by the heats of summer and giving to
them its dust. And she was at home in this aridity. In the dust he was
aware of the definiteness of her. Since the blackness had overtaken him
people had meant to him less than shadows gliding on a wall mean to a
joyous man. Often he had observed them, even sharply and with a sort of
obstinate persistence; he had been trying to force them to become real
to him. Invariably he had failed in his effort. Mrs. Clarke was real to
him as she walked in silence beside him, between the handsome railed-in
mausoleums which line the empty roads from the water's edge almost to
the mosque of the Conqueror. A banal phrase came to his lips, "You are
in your element here." But he held it back, remembering that they walked
in the midst of dust.

Leaving the mosque they ascended the hill and passed the Tekkeh of the
dancing dervishes. All around them were the Turkish graves with their
leaning headstones, or their headstones fallen and lying prone in the
light flaky earth above the smoldering corpses of the dead. Here and
there tight bunches of flowers were placed upon the graves. Gaunt
shadows from old cypresses fell over some of them, defining the
sunlight