The Snake Stone

106

The Suleymaniye Mosque stands on the third hill of Istanbul, overlooking the Golden Horn. Built by Sinan, the master architect, for his patron, Suleyman the Magnificent, in 1557, it reflects all the piety and grandeur of its age. Some of the foremost scholars of Islam toiled in its medresse or consulted its well-stocked library; its kitchens fed over a thousand mouths a day, in charity; and its central fountain, in the Great Court, gladdened the hearts of the faithful and cooled the hands and faces of shoppers emerging from the Grand Bazaar nearby.

When, in the course of the morning, the spurting jets of the fountain declined to a mere dribble, it aroused irritation-and some anxiety. Some of the faithful objected that the water could not be very fresh; some of the more superstitious wondered if the unspoken crisis was approaching, and asked for news of the sultan’s health.

Fifty feet or so beneath the ground, in a spur off the main pipe that Sinan had himself constructed, water was backing up against an unusual obstruction, formed at a point where two pipes of a different gauge met. The obstruction at first was merely a tangled mass of wool and loose stones, but it became a nuisance only later, when it was compounded by the drifting corpse of a former waterman called Enver Xani. Xani filled the hole quite neatly; and as the water level rose, so the blockage of bloated flesh and wool and stones was jammed ever more firmly against the narrow lip of the smaller pipe. It became the perfect seal.

The dribble of water from the fountain of the Suleymaniye eventually stopped flowing altogether; but the sultan, according to reports, was still alive.