have presented toward the close of the spring of 1453. Just here the life of all that mighty army flowed back as to its heart, clasping in its fatal embrace the great dying metropolis; from this point those orders were issued which fell on all sides like thunderbolts, set in motion the arms of a hundred thousand workmen, directed the overland transportation of two hundred galleys[A] from the Bay of Beshiktash to the bay of Kassim-Pasha, thrust armies of Armenian miners into the bowels of the earth, despatched heralds in all directions whose flags announced the hour of attack, and in the time it would take to tell the beads of a tespi bent three hundred thousand bows and caused three hundred thousand cimeters to flash in the air. Here the trembling envoys of Constantine came face to face with their Genoese countrymen from Galata selling oil with which to grease Orbano’s mighty cannon, and Mussulman scouts stationed upon the banks of the Sea of Marmora in order that they might give warning when the European fleet should appear upon the horizon bringing the last relief of Christianity to the last defences of the Constantines. There too were to be found a swarm of renegade Christians, Asiatic adventurers, old sheikhs, and lean, ragged dervishes, wasted away by long marches, going restlessly back and forth among the tents of the fourteen thousand Janissaries; and interminable troops of horse already harnessed, long files of camels standing motionless in the midst of catapults and battering-rams, and cannons lying overturned where they had exploded, and great pyramids of huge granite balls, among which wound long processions of begrimed and blackened soldiers bearing two by two from the neighborhood of the walls to the open country beyond the mutilated bodies of the dead and groaning forms of the wounded; while over all there hung a perpetual cloud of smoke. [A] There were eighty galleys, according to Ducas.--TRANS. [Illustration: Mosque of the Chora.]