“April 27.—I have been suffering terribly from rheumatic fever, but am better to-day, and have been to St. Sophia. The carriage stopped at an obscure door on the N.W., where the cavass took off his boots and fetched some of the Turkish guardians of holiness, who, for a very large consideration of baksheesh, put slippers over ours. Then we passed the curtain, and found ourselves at once at the northern extremity of the great western narthex, like that of St. Mark’s at Venice on a huge scale, and—almost immediately—from a side-door, in the church itself.
“It is so unspeakably, overwhelmingly, indescribably, entrancingly, bewilderingly glorious, words can give no idea of it.
“Of the immense space—a St. Mark’s lifted into the heavens, soaring far above in the mystic involutions of its entwining arches and the delicate nuances of its grey-golden colouring, never sufficiently defined to be obtrusive in any special point, only melting and harmonising into a whole as tender and glorious as the hues on a dove’s back. So also in the architectural details; all the walls, all the chapels are filled with the most exquisite and graceful sculptured ornament, but the grand impression of space is never lessened by any single object leaving its own identity upon the vision, till the gaze rests far above upon the pendentives of the mightiest dome, where float the four huge prophetic seraphim[486] with their many wings folded in repose—with twain they covered their breasts, with twain they covered their feet, and with twain they did fly.
“Close to the entrance was a vast fountain gurgling, rushing, spouting—a fountain of ablutions. Far towards the east, and beneath the two floating green banners of the Prophet, was the mimber or pulpit of Friday prayer, and near it a platform for the choir, who face, not the east, but the Kibla, the holy house of Mecca. Under the shadowy arches are the cup and cradle of Jesus of Bethlehem, revered as a great teacher, the latter a hollowed block of red marble; the ‘sweating column,’ the ‘shining stone,’ and the ‘cold window,’ fresh with the north wind, where the Sheik Shemseddin, the companion of Mahomet II. (the Conqueror), expounded the Koran. We may also see the pillar on which Mahomet the Conqueror left the mark of his bloody hand; for through the church itself, and the crowds of clergy and virgins who had taken refuge there, he rode, exclaiming ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ and ordaining the violation of sanctuary. Here and there, but lost in the extreme immensity, are chapels or refuges where groups of men, or of veiled women apart from them, seem to hold little services, with private litanies of their own. In some of these, solitary individuals, wrapped in devotion or penance, were perpetually smiting the earth with their foreheads: in one an old man was shouting, yelling, screaming portions of the Koran, flinging the words with savagest ferocity amongst groups of squatters in fezes and turbans, who received them quite unconcerned.
“The columns in the church make up the mystic number of forty, typical to the Eastern mind of all pomp and splendour. The cupola is inscribed ‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth!’ On its Rhodian tiles are written ‘God hath founded it, and it will not be overthrown: God will support it in the blush of the dawn.’ Nothing probably remains of the fourth-century church of Constantine, but the present church is chiefly that of Justinian, who employed a hundred architects, each with a hundred masons under him, of whom five thousand worked on the right, and five thousand on the left, according to the advice given to the emperor by an angel. The church itself is under the guardianship of an angel, who appeared to a boy watching the tools of lazy masons, and bade him hurry them back to their work, saying he would guard his charge till he came back. But the boy never came back, for the emperor intercepted him, and sent him off, well provided for, to the Cyclades, that the angel might be obliged to watch for ever.
“Our driver stuck his cigarette behind his ear and took us to the Hippodrome, where we saw the great obelisk, raised by Theodosius on a base with curious reliefs: and the brazen serpents supposed to have been brought from Delphi, or the remains of them, for the Sultan Murad broke off one of their heads. Along the side of the square runs the screen of the Mosque of Ahmed (the state church), enclosing its vast dusty court, old elm-trees, cloister, and a fountain, around which were groups of people washing, dressing, and being shaved before entering the sanctuary.
“We drove by the tomb of the Sultan Mahmoud the Reformer, where we stared through a metal screen at his sarcophagus, to the finest of the great mosques or djami, the glorious Suleimanyeh, which Solyman the Magnificent intended to surpass St. Sophia. On its giant dome is the truly catholic inscription (Sura xxiv. 36), ‘God is the light of heaven and earth. His light is in the windows on the wall, in which a lamp burns covered with glass. The glass shines like a star, the lamp is lit with the oil of a blessed tree. No Eastern, no Western oil; it shines for whoever wills it.’ On the ever-clean matted floor of this mosque of glorious proportions numbers of barefooted children were sporting as in a playground, and very pretty and graceful were the interlacing groups which they made. The ecclesiastical revenue of Suleimanyeh is 300,000 piastres. Behind is a curious burial-ground, crowded with tombs, chiefly of women, marked by a sculptured rose, whilst the headstones of the men are crowned by a turban or fez. In two great sepulchral chapels or turbé lie Solyman the Magnificent and his immediate family and successors. The sarcophagi are covered with splendid embroideries and delicate muslins, those of the sultans being often shrouded by their favourite wives with their shawls—most precious of their possessions. At their heads are their tall white turbans, with bunches of peacocks’ feathers on either side. The famous Roxolana lies amongst the group of ladies.
“But all through the streets of Stamboul the greatest feature is the little burial-grounds, with their closely packed tombs and their huge cypresses or tamarind trees, which always give them picturesqueness, between the houses, at the angles of the streets, everywhere—the dead forced, as it were, into the very life of the living, and never to be forgotten for a moment.
“The next great feature—and an odious one—is the swarms of dogs, like little foxes, which lie about everywhere in the sun, encumbering the footways, and refusing to move for any one. They are the friends of cats, but if a strange dog enters their quarter, they demolish him at once. They never bite a human being, at least they have never been known to bite more than one, and that was—the Russian ambassador! Successive travellers have given the idea that they are scavengers, but it is quite false: a man goes round at night with a cart and takes everything undesirable away. All night the air resounds with the yells of the dogs. The English doctor is obliged to poison them by hundreds near the hospital, or all the patients would die of the noise.
“We ended our first eventful drive at the Mosque of Bajazet, where the court was now turned into a bazaar, and round the central fountain glowed a moving mass of colour—white turbans, green turbans of Mecca, pilgrims, negroes, Armenians, robed women in shot violet silk. Overhead a perfect roar of wings indicated that the sacred pigeons of the mosque were moving in vast battalions from one part to another. At the many-coloured stalls, the beads—especially the green beads—were quite irresistible. In the turbé of Bajazet, under the head of the Sultan, is a brick made of all the dust collected off his clothes and shoes during his lifetime: his mother and his two daughters lie beside him.