Asia are beneath our feet, the eye can trace the sinuosities of the Bosphorus, and far away in the distance looms the snow-capped pyramidal summit of Mount Olympus, in Bithynia. But this enchantment vanishes as soon as we penetrate into the streets of Constantinople. There are many parts of the town with narrow and filthy streets, which a stranger hesitates to enter. It is, perhaps, a blessing, from a sanitary point of view, that conflagrations so frequently lay waste and scour large portions of the city. Scarcely a night passes without the watchman on the tower of the Seraskieriate giving the alarm of fire, and thousands of houses are devoured by that element every year. The city thus renews itself by degrees. It rises from its ashes purified by the flames. But formerly, before the Turks had built their city of stone on the heights of Pera, the quarters destroyed by fire were rebuilt as wretchedly as they were before. It is different now. The use of stone has become more general; wooden structures are being replaced by houses built {101} of a fossiliferous white limestone, which is quarried at the very gates of the city; and free use is made of the blue and grey marbles of Marmara, and of the flesh-coloured ones of the Gulf of Cyzica, in Asia Minor, in decorating the palaces of the great. Nearly every vestige of the monuments of ancient Byzantium has been swept away by fires or sieges. There only exists now the precious tripod of bronze, with its three serpents, which the Platæans had placed in the temple of Delphi in commemoration of their victory over the Persians. The relics of the epoch of the Byzantine emperors are limited to columns, obelisks, arches of aqueducts, the breached walls of the city, the remains of the palace of Justinian, only discovered recently, and the two churches of Santa Sophia, which have been converted into mosques. The grand church of Santa Sophia, close to the Seraglio, is no longer the most magnificent edifice in the universe, as it was in the time of Justinian, for even the neighbouring mosque of Sultan Ahmed far exceeds it in beauty and elegance. It is a clumsy building, supported by buttresses added at various times to keep it from falling. The character of the interior has been changed by the Turks, who have introduced additional pillars, and the once bright mosaics have been covered over; but the dome never fails to strike the beholder: it is a marvel of strength and lightness.