But the feeling that remained on my mind was vague even to pain; I had seen St. Sophia, it is true, and seen it in all the glory of its million lamps; I had beheld it at a moment when no christian eye had ever heretofore looked on it; and when detection would have involved instant destruction. I had lifted aside the veil from the Holy of Holies—witnessed the prostration which followed the thrilling cry of “Allah Il Allah!”—and polluted, with the breath of a Giaour, the atmosphere of the True Believers—I had looked upon the Chèïk-Islam, as he stood with his face turned Mecca-ward, his pale brow cinctured with gold, and his stately figure draped in white cachemere—and I had stood erect when every head was bowed, and every knee bent at the name of the Prophet; but still I had no definite idea of the mosque of St. Sophia; on the contrary, the wish that I had formerly felt to visit it grew to a positive craving from the hour in which I found myself at midnight beneath its fire-girdled dome, and glanced out into the deep and mysterious darkness beyond; and it was not until months afterwards that it was satisfied, when the arrival of Count Bathiany, an Hungarian nobleman, brother to the Princess Metternich, gave an opportunity to the curious of indulging their lion-hunting propensities. The party assembled at half-past ten in the morning at one of the gates of the city, near the Seraglio wall, known by the name of “The Gate of the Garden.” There were horsemen and pedestrians—ladies in arabas, and on foot—spruce _attachés_, grave elderly gentlemen, anxious antiquaries, officers of the navy, dragomen, foreign nobles, native servants, and a motley train of sailors and attendants, carrying the slippers of their several masters. But if the eye were confused by the number of objects by which it was attracted as our party passed, procession-like, through the narrow streets, amid the comments and not unfrequently the scowls of the Turks, who bear but impatiently this licensed profanation of their temples; the ear was infinitely more so by the confusion of languages which assailed it on all sides; here, two Russians almost set your teeth on edge as they exchanged a few sentences—there, a couple of Germans deluded you for the first moment into a belief that they were conversing in English—on one side, a dark-eyed stranger begged your pardon in his low soft Italian, for an awkwardness of which you were not conscious, and thus gave himself an opportunity of addressing you during the morning, without rudeness—and on the other, two smart midshipmen laughed out in the lightness of their hearts words which told of home, because they were breathed in the language of your own land—while a constant chorus of Turkish, Greek, and Arab, was kept up by the attendants in the rear.