Now, however, all these things have faded into one another in my memory. I only see the tiny black speck of my own insignificant self wandering like a detached atom up and down those vast naves, between two lines of diminutive Turks prostrated at their devotions. As I move on, dazzled by the pervading whiteness, stupefied by the strange light, awed and subdued by the immensity around me, dragging my worn slippers--and my humbled pride as a descriptive writer as well--it seems as though one mosque melted into another, and that all around me in every direction there arose interminable ranks of roofs and pilasters, a white illimitable throng in which sight and sense are swallowed up. My recollections of how I passed another day are full of mystery and crowded with phantom shapes. Entering the courtyard of a Mussulman private house, and descending by the light of a torch to the very lowest of a flight of damp, mouldy stairs, I found myself beneath the vaulted roof of the Yeri Betan Serai, the great cistern basilica of Constantine, whose confines, according to vulgar belief in Constantinople, are unknown; the greenish waters lose themselves in the distance beneath the black roof, lit up here and there by a vivid ray of light, which seems only to increase the horror of the surrounding darkness. The crimson flame from our torch throws a lurid glare over the arches nearest to us, falls in slanting rays upon the dripping walls, and brings into view dim, confused tiers of columns intercepting the perspective in all directions like the tree-trunks of some vast submerged forest. The imagination, drawn on in spite of itself by a sort of horrible fascination, penetrates those sepulchral galleries, hovers above the face of those gloomy waters, and finally loses itself amid the intricate windings of those endless columns. Meanwhile the dragoman is murmuring in one’s ear blood-curdling tales of adventurous persons who have embarked upon those waters and started off with the intention of exploring their farthermost limits, only to return, long hours afterward, with blanched faces and hair on end, while behind them could be heard boisterous shouts of mocking laughter and piercing shrieks, which echoed and re-echoed beneath the vaulted roof; and others, again, who never returned at all, having met their end--who knows how?--driven insane, perhaps, by terror, or possibly starved to death, or drawn by mysterious currents to some unknown abyss far away from Stambul, God only can tell where. Issuing once more into the broad, sunny light of the At-Meidan square, all these gloomy fancies at once take flight, and a few minutes later we again descend, and find ourselves surrounded by the two hundred pillars of the dry cistern of Binbûr, where a hundred Greek silk-spinners are singing a martial song as they work in the pale, unearthly light broken by interlacing lines of arches, while from overhead comes the dull, confused rumble of a passing caravan.