Sitting in the morning shade, the imams of the Green Mosque were beginning their day's meditation. The early hours of the new sun had just reunited them in their familiar spot beside the holy terrace under the hundred-year-old plane trees. Behind them, the mosque showed off its marble facade. At their feet and before their meditating eyes, the town of Bursa, drowning in greenery, swept down softly into the distant depths of the plains.

The imams of the Green Mosque were meditating in the shade. The new leaves of the plane trees spread out a fresh dome above their motionless turbans. Little noise disturbed their unfocused thoughts: bird songs, the music of the running water and from afar, the happy voices of little children. From the town below, half-hidden in the trees, the murmur of its peaceful life, muffled beneath so much foliage, scarcely reached them.

The terrace where the imams were meditating was like a religious peristyle, forming an outside sanctuary. It was surrounded by a low wall covered in May flowers and was accessed through a portal open to the four winds. In addition to the venerable plane trees under which the imams were sheltering, there was also a huge dark cypress and a white pavilion with light arches from which a fountain gushed forth.

I entered this place of continual peace for the first time with my travelling companion. We had been in Bursa since the previous evening, summoned by the French ambassador.

The residence where our ambassador had kindly offered us his hospitality was situated half-way up a mountain outside the town, almost in the fields between Bursa and a village called Ҫekirge. It is a new oriental house, not quite finished, with floors and doors still unpainted. Downstairs, there is a hall paved with tiles, while upstairs our rooms look out right into the far distance. There is a grand drawing-room with freshly whitewashed walls, onto which long silk and gold embroideries in the shape of mosque doors have been nailed.

We had arrived very late yesterday by carriage on a moonless night and could not even take a guess as to what the charming old town was like. This morning, with our windows open to the clear sunlight, we were at first astonished, as everything came into view. We had the feeling of just having been plunged into the olden days of Islam and of having been here during spring in the past, in a green and peaceful garden of Eden. Then, we went out into the bright countryside, and, hurrying to discover the Green Mosque, we hired one of those little Turkish carriages that stand under large trees at crossroads. Like some strange dinghy, it was painted with all sorts of designs and flowers, lacking in springs and low with a curved roof, adorned with a shining sheet of copper and pearl embellishment. The driver wore a red jacket, braided with gold. The grey horse, splashed with henna, had collars, pendants and bells. It was an archaic simple Orient, even a little childish, gambolling in colourful delight.