The Snake Stone

77

Far away, at the other end of the city, Amelie stood back and shielded her eyes with her free hand, like a woman trying to see far off on a sunlit day.

Very slowly she turned her hand to let her eyes travel upward, every moment revealing more details of the celestial form of the greatest building ever raised on earth.

She saw the great bronze doors that were cast two thousand years before in the sands of Tarsus. The pilasters, sculpted from marble, gleaming white in the sun. The windows of the tympanum, black and small and crisp, their decorative ironwork all but invisible in the glare, and the great arch curving above them, slender as a bird’s wing, strong enough to assume the weight of the great dome.

She saw, and did not see, the graceful minarets that fluted upward from the squinches of the dome.

She saw the red ocher of the great drum overhead, pierced with windows to admit the light. She saw the lead cappings of the dome.

And at the top, high above, she saw a silver crescent on its slender rod, a crescent that stood where the cross had stood for a thousand years, before the last days of May 1453.

In the last days, the cross had glowed with an eerie light. It had been concealed by fog. It saw the sky turn red and the crescent moon glow like a sliver in the dark, with the Ottomans readying themselves outside the walls, preparing for a final assault.

Slowly, Amelie lowered her hand.

She had seen the Pantheon, in Rome: a tribute to Roman strength and the Romans’ faith in concrete. She had seen the shattered remnant of the Parthenon. She had lain awake at night, willing herself to dream of the Pyramids, whose massive and enigmatic bulk she had met with in the great work of the Napoleonic savants.

But Aya Sofia was a case apart: the last and grandest gesture of the ancient world.

And the world had been trying to measure up to it ever since.

She raised her arms, to frame the vision between her two hands. There was, she thought fiercely, only one more thing that remained to be done.

She began to walk forward, toward the Great Church.