Seven individuals only, as I have already mentioned, detached themselves from the throng, of which number I was one; and I understood at once the secret of the line of light that had struck me so forcibly on the night of my first visit, when I remarked the clustered lamps which were still attached to the lower railing of the gallery; and I wondered no longer at the sublime effect they had produced, as I perceived the immense height at which they had been placed. The path we had to follow was about a foot in width, and the slight railing that protected it was secured by iron bars to the wall beyond; but in two places the projecting ledge that formed the passage had lost its horizontal position, and sloped downwards at the outer edge, giving a most uncomfortable projection to the wooden fence; these little inconveniences were, however, amply compensated by the sublime effect of the edifice, seen thus, as it seemed, from the clouds; while the beautiful proportions of the dome became tenfold more evident as the eye took in its whole extent, unbewildered by the immense space which had baffled it from below. While I stood gazing on the magnificent spectacle spread out beneath me, a couple of doves winged their tranquil flight across the body of the mosque, to their resting-places on the opposite side of the building. As these birds are held sacred by the Musselmauns, they abound about all their public edifices, and multiply to an extraordinary extent; and their appearance, at a moment when my fancy was awakened, and my feelings excited, by the objects of beauty and of grandeur that surrounded me, produced an effect so powerful as to give birth to a very different train of ideas from those in which I had previously been indulging.[6] The tour of the gallery completed our survey of the far-famed St. Sophia; and flinging off the slippers which we had drawn over our shoes, we exchanged the marble floor, covered with yielding carpets, for the steep and stony streets leading to the mosque of Sultan Achmet. On passing through the Atmeidan (or Place of Horses) on one side of which the mosque is situated, a large plane tree was pointed out to me, from whose branches Sultan Mahmoud caused several of the principal Janissaries to be hanged, during the destruction of that formidable body, whence it is called by the Turks “the Tree of Groans.” The exterior of the building was already familiar to me, as it was from the courtyard of Sultan Achmet that I had seen the procession of the Kourban-Baïram; but of its interior I retained only the same dreamy, indistinct impression which I had carried away on the same occasion from St. Sophia.