"Your Majesty, a favor first.... A man is in the road dead. Let his body be placed on a bier, and carried to his friends."
"A most Christian request! My Lord Chamberlain, attend to it."
The cavalcade betook itself then to other parts, the better to see the disposition of the Turks; and everywhere on the landward side it was the same—troops in masses, and intrenchments in progress. Closing the inspection at set of sun, the Emperor beheld the sea and the Bosphorus in front of the Golden Horn covered with hundreds of sails.
"The leaguer is perfected," said the Genoese.
"And the issue with God," Constantine replied. "Let us to Hagia St. Sophia."
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT GUN SPEAKS
The first sufficient gleam of light next morning revealed to the watchmen on the towers an ominous spectacle. Through the night they had heard a medley of noises peculiar to a multitude at work with all their might; now, just out of range of their own guns, they beheld a continuous rampart of fresh earth grotesquely spotted with marbles from the cemetery.
In no previous siege of the Byzantine capital was there reference to such a preliminary step. To the newly enlisted, viewing for the first time an enemy bodily present, it seemed like the world being pared down to the smallest dimensions; while their associate veterans, to whom they naturally turned for comfort, admitted an appreciable respect for the Sultan. Either he had a wise adviser, they said, or he was himself a genius.