Besides, he knew that she was jealous. She had heard of Giustina, and was determined to see her. She insisted that the boat should keep to the left, going up the Golden Horn, and she made the secretary point out Sebastian Polo's dwelling. It was a small palace, a hundred yards below the gardens of Blachernæ, and it had marble steps, like those at Zeno's house. A girl with dyed hair sat in the shade in an upper balcony; her hair was red auburn, like that of the Venetian women, and her face was white, but that was all Zoë could see. She wished she had a hawk's eyes. Omobono said it might be Giustina, but as the latter had many friends, it might also be one of them, for most Venetian women had hair of that colour.
Farther up, they neared Blachernæ, and came first to the great Amena tower, of which the foundations stood on an escarped pier in the water. Zoë looked up, trying to guess the height of the upper windows from the water, but she had no experience, and they were very high--perhaps a hundred palms, perhaps fifty--Zeno would know. Could he get up there by a rope? She wondered, and she thought of what she should feel if she herself were hanging there in mid-air by a single rope against the smooth wall. Then in her imagination she saw Zeno half-way up, and some one cut the line above, for he was discovered, and he fell. A painful thrill ran down the back of her neck and her spine and through her limbs, and she shrank in her seat.
It was up there, in the highest story, that Johannes had been a prisoner nearly two years. The windows needed no gratings, for it would be death to leap out, and no one could climb up to get in. The pier below the tower sloped to the stream, and its base ran out so far that no man could have jumped clear of it from above--even if he dared the desperate risk of striking the water. Bertrandon de la Broquière saw it, years afterwards, when Zeno was an old man, and you may look at a good picture of it in his illuminated book.
A solitary fisherman was perched on the edge of the sloping pier, apparently hindered from slipping off by the very slight projection of the lowest course of stones, which was perpendicular. His brown legs were bare far above the knee, he wore a brown fisherman's coat of a woollen stuff, not woven but fulled like felt; a wide hat of sennet, sewn round and round a small crown of tarred sailcloth, flapped over his ears. He angled in the slow stream with a long reed and a short line.