Water falls from the sky, and green-fanged lightning mouths the heavens. The Earth rolls upon itself, incessantly creating morning and evening. The moon calls to the waters, swinging them forward and back, and the sun draws closer and as rhythmically recedes, advancing in the pattern of an ancient dance, making a figure of leaves and aridness. Harmony of chords and pauses, fugue of returning balances, canon and canon repeating the theme of Earth, Air, and Water.
A single cymbal-crash of Fire, and for an instant the concerted music ceases. But it resumes—Earth, Air, and Water, and out of it rise the metals, unconsumed. Brazen cymbals, trumpets of silver, bells of bronze. They mock at fire. They burn upon themselves and retain their entities. Not yet the flame which shall destroy them. They shall know all flames but one. They shall be polished and corroded, yet shall they persist and play the music which accompanies the strange ceremonious dance of the sun.
CONSTANTINOPLE
Empire of the East! Byzantium! Constantinople! The Golden City of the World. A crystal fixed in aquamarines; a jewel-box set down in a seaside garden. All the seas are as blue as Spring lupins, and there are so many seas. Look where you please, forward, back, or down, there is water. The deep blue water of crisp ripples, the long light shimmer of flat undulations, the white glare, smoothing into purple, of a sun-struck ebb. The Bosphorus winds North to the Black Sea. The Golden Horn curves into the Sweet Waters. The edge of the city swerves away from the Sea of Marmora. Aquamarines, did I say? Sapphires, beryls, lapis-lazuli, amethysts, and felspar. Whatever stones there are, bluer than gentians, bluer than cornflowers, bluer than asters, bluer than periwinkles. So blue that the city must be golden to complement the water. A geld city, shimmering and simmering, starting up like mica from the green of lemon trees, and olives, and cypresses.
Gold! Gold! Walls and columns covered with gold. Domes of churches resplendent with gold. Innumerable statues of "bronze fairer than pure gold," and courts paved with golden tiles. Beyond the white and rose-coloured walls of Saint Sophia, the city rounds for fourteen great miles; fourteen miles of onychite, and porphyry, and marble; fourteen miles of colonnades, and baths, and porticoes; fourteen miles of gay, garish, gaudy, glaring gold. Why, even the Imperial triremes in the harbour have gold embroidered gonfalons, and the dolphins, ruffling out of the water between them, catch the colour and dive, each a sharp cutting disk-edge of yellow flame.
It is the same up above, where statues spark like stars jutted from a mid-day sky. There are golden Emperors at every crossing, and golden Virgins crowding every church-front. And, in the centre of the great Hippodrome, facing the triremes and the leaping dolphins, is a fine chariot of Corinthian brass. Four horses harnessed to a gilded quadriga. The horses pace evenly forward, in a moment they will be trampling upon space, facing out to sea on the currents of the morning breeze. But their heads are arched and checked, gracefully they pause, one leg uplifted, seized and baffled by the arrested movement. They are the horses of Constantine, brought from Rome, so people say, buzzing in the Augustaion. "Fine horses, hey?" "A good breed, Persia from the look of them, though they're a bit thick in the barrel for the horses they bring us from there." "They bring us their worst, most likely." "Oh, I don't know, we buy pretty well. Why, only the other day I gave a mint of money for a cargo of Egyptian maize." "Lucky dog, you'll make on that, with all the harvest here ruined by the locusts."
It is a pretty little wind which plays along the sides of the gilded horses, a coquettish little sea wind, blowing and listing and finally dropping away altogether and going to sleep in a plane-tree behind the Hippodrome.
Constantinople is a yellow honey-comb, with fat bees buzzing in all its many-sided cells. Bees come over the flower-blue seas; bees humming from the Steppes of Tartary, from the long line of Nile-fed Egypt. Tush! What would you! Where there is gold there are always men about it; to steal it, to guard it, to sit and rot under its lotus-shining brilliance. The very army is woven of threads drawn from the edges of the world. Byzantines are merchantmen, they roll and flounder in the midst of gold coins, they tumble and wallow in money-baths, they sit and chuckle under a continuous money-spray. And ringed about them is the army, paid to shovel back the scattering gold pieces: Dalmatians with swords and arrows; Macedonians with silver belts and gilt shields; Scholarii, clad in rose-coloured tunics; Varangians, shouldering double battle-axes. When they walk, the rattle of them can be heard pattering back from every wall and doorway. It clacks and cracks even in the Copper Market, above the clang of cooking pots and the wrangling whine of Jewish traders. Constantinople chatters, buzzes, screams, growls, howls, squeals, snorts, brays, croaks, screeches, crows, neighs, gabbles, purrs, hisses, brawls, roars, shouts, mutters, calls, in every sort of crochet and demi-semi-quaver, wavering up in a great contrapuntal murmur—adagio, maestoso, capriccioso, scherzo, staccato, crescendo, vivace, veloce, brio—brio—brio!! A racket of dissonance, a hubbub of harmony. Chords? Discords? Answer: Byzantium!
People pluck the strings of rebecks and psalteries; they shock the cords of lyres; they batter tin drums, and shatter the guts of kettle-drums when the Emperor goes to Saint Sophia to worship at an altar of precious stones fused into a bed of gold and silver, and, as he walks up the nave between the columns of green granite, and the columns of porphyry, under the golden lily on the Octagonal Tower, the bells pour their notes over the roofs, spilling them in single jets down on each side of the wide roofs. Drip—drip—drip—out of their hearts of beaten bronze, slipping and drowning in the noise of the crowds clustered below.
On the top of the Hippodrome, the bronze horses trot toward the lupin-coloured Sea of Marmora, slowly, without moving; and, behind them, the spokes of the quadriga wheels remain separate and single, with the blue sky showing between each one.