But as his eyes adjusted to the faint light from overhead, his ears were tuned to a new and gentler sound, the bubbling of water and its liquid echo from the walls and roof. The sweat cooled on his skin, and he raised his arms to embrace the air. When he breathed deeply, it felt as if the air were cleansing him from the inside. He felt an urge to laugh, to step forward through the dim light and plunge himself into the glistening black pool that was spread out at his feet.
Yashim brought his arms across his chest, rubbing his hands up and down.
The big tank was fed, as far as he could see, by a spigot set in the wall, and at various points around its edge the water shimmered over into smaller tanks, like basins. In the great tank the water seemed black until it spilled across the lip: this is how the water is divided, he thought, observing the way the basins were set against the walls, each basin higher than the next, each one letting the water gurgle across its lip to the basin below.
Yashim went forward cautiously, balancing on the broad rim of the great tank.
He glanced back at the spigot. Water was pouring from it in a steady stream. It seemed impossible that a single spout like this could serve so many people across the huge city—the standpipes and the fountains. Unfaltering, never-ending, the stream twisted and flexed as if it were alive. Looking around, Yashim could see the small openings set in the walls where the flow was channeled out across Istanbul, a series of little black mouths, like snake holes. Some of them were stopped with rags. Some were open.
Yashim shuddered involuntarily. It was cold in the siphon.
On the lowest basin of them all, about six feet beneath the tank where Yashim was standing, lay the mouth of a low tunnel, far larger than all the rest, into which the water skimmed so broad and shallow that its motion was imperceptible.
Yashim descended from basin to basin, treading on the rims, feeling the air grow colder with every step.
The tunnel puzzled him. Even if all the outflows, the little pipes, were blocked by rags, the tunnel would never come close to overflowing. The largest amount of water that could flow down it came from the spigot above. He glanced up. Its discharge was no thicker than a man’s arm.
As he watched, a silver ball dropped from the spigot and floated gently across the great tank.
And at the same moment a great shaft of light illuminated the tank and the basins of water, and sent huge ripples of their reflection across the walls and roof.
The door swung open.
And in the eruption of the glare, Yashim did the only thing he could.
He ducked down and made a dive for the tunnel.
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.
78
YASHIM pulled himself into the tunnel like a snake disappearing into its hole. Light from the doorway danced and sparkled on the walls: ahead lay only darkness.
