THE SOLDIER'S FRIEND. shadows, with here and there bright sun -gleams, sometimes though but rarelypierce the gloomyshades, give an awful and startling effect to the scene." One tomb amid the crowd attracts attention by its beauty ; it is a canopy, supported by six columns, marking the last resting-place of Sultan Mahmoud's favourite horse ! There is a poetical legend connected with this cemetery which is most romantic. " Myriads of birds, about the size of a thrush, frequent the dark shades, and hover over the tombs, or flit noiselessly from that ' sea of storms,' the Euxine, to the fairer sea of Marmora, where they turn and retrace their flight, often touching the masts of the vessels that sail beneath them. They have never been seen to stop, or to feed, and they have never been heard to sing ; all their life seems past in flitting from one sea to another. No one has, as yet, discovered exactly what kind of bird these phan- tom wanderers are, for it is asserted that a dead one has never been seen, and the Moslems hold them in so much veneration that they will not permit one to be killed. All that is known of them is, that they have a dark plumage, andblue feathers on the breast. During the tempestuousweather which so frequently disturbs the waves of the Bosphorus, when these birds can no longer flit in mid air, they desert the sea for the land, and take shelter in the cypress groves. At these times, when the storm rages, and Boreas himself seems unchained, and to be pouring E 87
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