The pillage lasted eight hours without exhausting the riches of an empire. The coined treasure was more than four million ducats, the uncoined gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, vases and ornaments of palaces and churches was incalculable. One hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts warmed the baths of the barbarians. But at the close of the day Mohammed entered at the head of his Janizaries to restore order. He proceeded at once to the Church of St. Sophia. The soldiers were still engaged in pillaging its treasures: and one of the barbarians even in his presence continued the work of destroying a precious marble of the sanctuary. Mohammed struck him a blow with his club saying: "I have abandoned you the slaves and the treasures, but the monuments belong to me." The soldier was borne off dying from the church. Accustomed to Arabian and barbarian magnificence--Constantinople dazzled him as she sat in her grandeur the Queen of two continents on the shores of the Bosphorus:-- "Earth hath no fairer sight to show Than this blue strait, whose waters flow, Bordered with vineyards, summer bowers, White palaces and ivied towers." Mohammed after having admired the grandeur of the edifice, the elevation of the dome--a second temple upheld in air by one hundred columns of porphyry, of rose-colored marble or serpentine, mounted the altar and offered a Mussulman prayer: then ordered that this church, the most magnificent and majestic which Christianity had yet constructed should become the first Mosque of the Conquerors of Constantinople. The cross was torn down, the pictures of the saints destroyed, and Muezzins mounting to the dome chanted for the first time to the desert streets of the Metropolis of Christianity in the East, the well-known call: "God is God; God is great; Come to prayer." As the architects in his presence began to remove the mosaics of colored glass which formed the pictures in the ceiling we are told that Mohammed cried out: "Stop, confine yourselves to covering over these mosaics with a coat of lime so that they may not scandalize the believers but do not tear from the ceilings these marvelous incrustations. Who knows but that they may be uncovered at some future day in another change of fortune and of destination of this temple." That hour of Destiny has not yet struck the hour of deliverance, and the lime still covers the walls and the Muezzins still call the faithful to prayer above the noise and din of the busy streets of a fallen city once the glory of a Christian Empire. From St. Sophia Mohammed proceeded to the august but desolate palace of a hundred successors of the great Constantine but which in a few hours had been stripped of its pomp of royalty. A passing reflection on the vanity and vicissitudes of human greatness caused him to repeat an elegant distich of Persian poetry:--