There is an extraordinary fascination in that fluid panorama.—Page 70.
IV
If the solitary garden to which Anastass had referred was made less solitary by the arrival of an inmate, it must be said that, on the other hand, the number of habitués at the Bridge was diminished by three. But it is likely enough that the addition made more difference in the one than did the decrease to the other. Since the days of the Pasha who had loved his narrow strip of hillside enough to flatten his house into a long corridor against the rising slope, I think no one had so appreciated that terrace of many trees as our old man. He continued to have no words. He merely smiled, as if his heart were full of patience and peace. So Anastass, while treating him with unfailing deference, soon left him to wander by himself under the tragic cedars of Lebanon and the cheerful copper beeches which the Pasha had taught to live in strange conjunction before the rambling house.
It was not long before the old man found what the Pasha had known when he created this little paradise—that the most wonderful thing about it was the view. There was a certain rose arbor on the edge of the terrace where he would spend the long hot days, looking down as from a box at the play, upon the most romantic scene in the world. This was a bit of the Bosphorous, framed between a round crenellated tower and a steep stairway of red roofs. From the lane at the bottom of the terrace wall the hill fell away so suddenly that the wonderful sweep of blue lay almost under the old man’s eyes. The color of it alone was better than breakfast. But it was constantly overshot by things of passage: by great steamers hurrying on the business of the Black Sea; by the side-wheelers of the Bosphorus, with their prodigies of smoke and foam; by sailing ships of the strangest build, that might have come from Colchis and Iolcos—and probably did; by the light caïques slipping merrily down the Devil’s Current or laboriously making their way against it. And the Lost Souls! I do not know how they figure in the Debretts of Science, those fleet sea-swallows; but they forever skimmed up and down like clouds on the surface of the water, as if they filled the darker part in the purpose of the play.
All these things made a ceaseless web of circumstance on the shining blue floor between Mahommed’s tower and the stair of climbing roofs, and the old man spent his days in watching. Smiling alone in his arbor on the hill, as if everything were wonderful to him, one could not have told whether he ever thought of his island, and of the people who were not good, and of the pines that were up and the sea that was down. One could not even have told which of the changing panoramas of the day he found most wonderful. It might have been the early morning piece, when everything was so limpid that the water-side palace in the green background of Asian hills was cut of pearl. It might have been the late afternoon piece, when in the magic