File:The innocents abroad; (1897) (14778077262).jpg

Identifier: innocentsabroad01twai (find matches)
Title: The innocents abroad;
Year: 1897 (1890s)
Authors: Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
Subjects: Voyages and travels
Publisher: Hartford, American publishing company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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of boot-jacks gettingmy boots off that night, and even then some Christian hidepeeled off with them. I abate not a single boot-jack. St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundredyears old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older.Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St. Pe-ters, but its dirt is much more wonderful than its dome, thoughthey never mention it. The church has a hundred and sev-enty pillars in it, each a single piece, and all of costly marblesof various kinds, but they came from ancient temples at Baal-bee, Heliopolis, Athens and Ephesus, and are battered, uglyand repulsive. They were a thousand years old when this THE GREAT MOSQUE. 363 church was new, and then the contrast must have been ghast-ly—if Justinians architects did not trim them any. Theinside of the dome is figured all over with a monstrous inscrip-tion in Turkish characters, wrought in gold mosaic, that looksas glaring as a circus bill; the pavements and the marble bal-
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ST. SOPHIA. ustrades are all battered and dirty; the perspective is marredevery where by a web of ropes that depend from the dizzyheight of the dome, and suspend countless dingy, coarse oillamps, and ostrich-eggs, six or seven feet above the floor.Squatting and sitting in groups, here and there and far andnear, were ragged Turks reading books, hearing sermons, orreceiving lessons like children, and in fifty places were more 864 THE GREAT MOSQUE. of the same sort bowing and straightening up, bowing againand getting down to kiss the earth, muttering prayers thewhile, and keeping up their gymnastics till they ought to havebeen tired, if they were not. Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom;every where were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothingtouching or beautiful about it; every where were those groupsof fantastic pagans; overhead the gaudy mosaics and the webof lamp-ropes—nowhere was there any thing to win ones loveor challenge his admiration. The people who

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