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The strange poem that Langdon and Sienna had unveiled on the back of Dante’s death mask had eventually guided him here, to Istanbul. Langdon had directed the SRS team to Hagia Sophia, and knew there would be more to do once they arrived.
Kneel within the gilded mouseion of holy wisdom,
and place thine ear to the ground,
listening for the sounds of trickling water.
Follow deep into the sunken palace …
for here, in the darkness, the chthonic monster waits,
submerged in the bloodred waters …
of the lagoon that reflects no stars.
Langdon again felt troubled to know that the final canto of Dante’s Inferno ended in a nearly identical scene: After a long descent through the underworld, Dante and Virgil reach the lowest point of hell. Here, with no way out, they hear the sounds of trickling water running through stones beneath them, and they follow the rivulet through cracks and crevices … ultimately finding safety.
Dante wrote: “A place is there below … which not by sight is known, but by the sound of a rivulet, which descends along the hollow of a rock … and by that hidden way, my guide and I did enter, to return to the fair world.”
Dante’s scene had clearly been the inspiration for Zobrist’s poem, although in this case, it seemed Zobrist had flipped everything upside down. Langdon and the others would indeed be following the sounds of trickling water, but unlike Dante, they would not be heading away from the inferno … but directly into it.
As the van maneuvered through tighter streets and more densely populated neighborhoods, Langdon began to grasp the perverse logic that had led Zobrist to choose downtown Istanbul as the epicenter of a pandemic.
East meets West.
The crossroads of the world.
Istanbul had, at numerous times in history, succumbed to deadly plagues that killed off enormous portions of its population. In fact, during the final phase of the Black Death, this very city had been called the “plague hub” of the empire, and the disease was said to have killed more than ten thousand residents a day. Several famous Ottoman paintings depicted townspeople desperately digging plague pits to bury mounds of corpses in the nearby fields of Taksim.
Langdon hoped Karl Marx was wrong when he said, “History repeats itself.”
All along the rainy streets, unsuspecting souls were bustling about their evening’s business. A pretty Turkish woman called her children in to dinner; two old men shared a drink at an outdoor café； a well-dressed couple walked hand in hand beneath an umbrella; and a tuxedoed man leaped off a bus and ran down the street, sheltering his violin case beneath his jacket, apparently late for a concert.
Langdon found himself studying the faces around him, trying to imagine the intricacies of each person’s life.
The masses are made up of individuals.
He closed his eyes, turning from the window and trying to abandon the morbid turn his thoughts had taken. But the damage was done. In the darkness of his mind, an unwanted image materialized—the desolate landscape of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death—a hideous panorama of pestilence, misery, and torture laying ruin to a seaside city.
The van turned to the right onto Torun Avenue, and for a moment Langdon thought they had arrived at their destination. On his left, rising out of the mist, a great mosque appeared.
But it was not Hagia Sophia.
The Blue Mosque, he quickly realized, spotting the building’s six fluted, pencil-shaped minarets, which had multiple ?erefe balconies and climbed skyward to end in piercing spires. Langdon had once read that the exotic, fairy-tale quality of the Blue Mosque’s balconied minarets had inspired the design for Cinderella’s iconic castle at Disney World. The Blue Mosque drew its name from the dazzling sea of blue tiles that adorned its interior walls.
We’re close, Langdon thought as the van sped onward, turning onto Kabasakal Avenue and running along the expansive plaza of Sultanahmet Park, which was situated halfway between the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia and famous for its views of both.
Langdon squinted through the rain-swept windshield, searching the horizon for the outline of Hagia Sofia, but the rain and headlights made visibility difficult. Worse still, traffic along the avenue seemed to have stopped.
Up ahead, Langdon saw nothing but a line of glowing brake lights.
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