In making the tour of the gallery, we came upon a door that had been stopped with masonry; the frame into which it had originally fitted is of white marble, and remains quite perfect. There are traces of violence on the brick-work, which appears to have been secured by some powerful cement that has indurated with age, until it has acquired the solidity of stone, and has become capable of resisting any ordinary effort to remove it; and this door is the second miracle of St. Sophia.
The legend runs that the united attempts of all the masons of Stamboul are powerless against the rude masonry that blocks the entrance of this passage, by reason of a wondrous and most potent talisman, which human means have as yet failed to weaken; but that it conducts to an apartment in which a Greek Bishop is seated before a reading-desk perusing an open volume of so holy a nature, that no Moslem eye must ever rest upon it. Nor does the tradition end here, for both the Turks and Greeks have a firm faith in the prophecies which have been made, that St. Sophia will one day revert to the Christians, on which occasion the walled-up Bishop will emerge from his concealment, and chant a solemn high mass at the great altar.
The latter portion of the legend would imply that the superstition is of remote origin. I felt glad of this—these mystic imaginings require to be enveloped in the mist of centuries, in order to elevate the ridiculous into the sublime, and to attract our fancy without revolting our reason.
From the gallery we passed out upon the leads that cover the inferior cupolas of the building, and screen the mausoleums of the Sultans, and other distinguished personages, whose ashes repose within the holy precincts of St. Sophia; and, after traversing a number of these, and crouching through several low and narrow stone passages, stopping at intervals to contemplate the magnificent views that were spread out beneath us on all sides, and which varied every moment as we advanced, we at length found ourselves at the foot of the ruinous and crumbling stair, or rather ascent, (for the traces of steps are almost worn away) leading to the gallery encircling the dome.
Few of the party were disheartened by the difficulty; and accordingly we slipped and scrambled towards the summit, and resolved to see all the marvels of the place; but when the narrow door which opens from the gallery was flung back by the guide, “a change came o’er the spirit of our dream”—and out of the hundred individuals who were lion-hunting at St. Sophia, there were only seven who possessed nerve enough to make the tour of the dome. Many a fair lady and gallant knight leant for an instant over the slender fence, and looked down into the body of the building while clinging firmly to the rail; gazing on men reduced to the dimensions of pigmies, and wide carpets dwindled to the proportions of a pocket handkerchief; but a brief survey contented them, and they drew back from the dizzy spectacle, with swimming heads and aching eyes.
Seven individuals only, as I have already mentioned, detached themselves from the throng, of which number I was one; and I understood at once the secret of the line of light that had struck me so forcibly on the night of my first visit, when I remarked the clustered lamps which were still attached to the lower railing of the gallery; and I wondered no longer at the sublime effect they had produced, as I perceived the immense height at which they had been placed.
The path we had to follow was about a foot in width, and the slight railing that protected it was secured by iron bars to the wall beyond; but in two places the projecting ledge that formed the passage had lost its horizontal position, and sloped downwards at the outer edge, giving a most uncomfortable projection to the wooden fence; these little inconveniences were, however, amply compensated by the sublime effect of the edifice, seen thus, as it seemed, from the clouds; while the beautiful proportions of the dome became tenfold more evident as the eye took in its whole extent, unbewildered by the immense space which had baffled it from below.
While I stood gazing on the magnificent spectacle spread out beneath me, a couple of doves winged their tranquil flight across the body of the mosque, to their resting-places on the opposite side of the building. As these birds are held sacred by the Musselmauns, they abound about all their public edifices, and multiply to an extraordinary extent; and their appearance, at a moment when my fancy was awakened, and my feelings excited, by the objects of beauty and of grandeur that surrounded me, produced an effect so powerful as to give birth to a very different train of ideas from those in which I had previously been indulging.[6]
The tour of the gallery completed our survey of the far-famed St. Sophia; and flinging off the slippers which we had drawn over our shoes, we exchanged the marble floor, covered with yielding carpets, for the steep and stony streets leading to the mosque of Sultan Achmet.
On passing through the Atmeidan (or Place of Horses) on one side of which the mosque is situated, a large plane tree was pointed out to me, from whose branches Sultan Mahmoud caused several of the principal Janissaries to be hanged, during the destruction of that formidable body, whence it is called by the Turks “the Tree of Groans.” The exterior of the building was already familiar to me, as it was from the courtyard of Sultan Achmet that I had seen the procession of the Kourban-Baïram; but of its interior I retained only the same dreamy, indistinct impression which I had carried away on the same occasion from St. Sophia.