The dome is lighted by forty small windows, which pierce it immediately above the cornice which crowns its pendentives, and which, by subdividing its lower part into narrow piers, increases the feeling of its being supported by its own buoyancy. The interior thus generated, covered almost wholly by domes, or portions of them, each rising in succession higher and higher towards this floating hemisphere in the centre, and so arranged that one shall open out the view towards the others, and that nearly the entire system of vaulting may be viewed at a single glance, appears to me to be, in some respects, the noblest which has ever been designed, as it was certainly the most daring which, up to that time at least, if not absolutely, had ever been constructed. Its beauties are of a contrary kind to those of that noblest interior of antiquity--the Great Hall of Karnac--or to those of later ages--the Gothic cathedrals. Both of these gain beauty of effect and an increase of apparent extent through the endless intricacies of their perspective, and the changes of aspect at every step arising from the multitude of their columns, and from no possible view showing the whole interior at once. This, on the contrary, trusts to the very reverse of all this--the absence of interruptions and the studious distribution of parts, so that no one conceals another, but that the entire building shall be grasped at once by the eye (Fig. 425). I have not seen St. Sophia’s, though I long to do so, if only to view a form of artistic treatment so different from what I delight in in our own cathedrals. The internal effect does not, however, trust exclusively to this panoptical theory. The contrary theory was too well known from the Christian basilicæ to be lost sight of in this, the greatest of Christian [Illustration: Fig. 425.--Longitudinal Section, St. Sophia, Constantinople. (_From Fergusson._)]