Identifier: neareastdalmatia00hich (find matches)
Title: The near East; Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors: Hichens, Robert Smythe, 1864-1950 Guérin, Jules Vallée, 1866-1946, ill
Subjects: Dalmatia (Croatia) -- Description and travel Greece -- Description and travel Athens (Greece) -- Description and travel Istanbul (Turkey) -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : The Century Co.
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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ntain of Sultan Ahmed, I saw an enor-mous and ugly building decorated with huge stripesof red paint, towering above me as if fain to obscurethe sun. The immensity of it was startling. I askedits name. Santa Sophia. I looked away to the fountain, letting my eyesdwell on its projecting roof and its fretwork of gold,its lustrous blue and green tiles, splendid ironwork,and plaques of gray and brown marble. It was delicate and enticing. Its mighty neighborwas almost repellent. But at length—not withoutreluctance, for I feared perhaps a deeper disappoint-ment—I went into the mosque by the Porta Basilica,and found myself in the midst of a vast harmony, sowonderful, so penetrating, so calm, that I was con-scious at once of a perfect satisfaction. At first this happy sense of being completely satis-fied seemed shed upon me by shaped space. In noother building have I had this exact feeling, thatspace had surely taken an inevitable form and was 230 IHE ROYAL GATE LEADING TP, THE OLD SERAGLIO
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» - ^ A--a- STAMBOUL, THE CITY OF MOSQUES announcing itself to me. I stood beneath the greatdome, one hundred and seventy-nine feet in height,and as I gazed upward I felt both possessed and re-leased. For a long time I was fully aware of nothing butthe vast harmony of Santa Sophia, descending uponme, wrapping me round. I saw moving figures, tiny,yet full of meaning, passing in luminous distances,pausing, bending, kneeling; a ray of light fallingupon a white turban; an Arab in a long pink robeleaning against a column of dusky red porphyry; adove circling under the dome as if under the sky.But I could not be strongly conscious of any detail,or be enchanted by any separate beauty. I was inthe grasp of the perfect whole. The voice of a child disturbed me. Somewhere far off in the mosque a child began tosing a great tune, powerfully, fervently, but boy-ishly. The voice was not a treble voice; it wasdeeper, yet unmistakably the voice of a boy. Andthe melody sung was bold, indeed almost ang

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