At Right Angles, Touching The
Mosque, Was Such A House As One Can See Only In The East -
Fantastically Old,
Fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy,
melancholy, showing hideous windows, like windows in the slum of a
town set above coal-
Pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and
yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In
this building once dwelt the High Priest of the mosque. This dwelling,
the ancient wall, the grey minaret with its motionless bird, the
lamentable waste ground at my feet, prepared me rightly to appreciate
the bit of old Cairo I had come to see.
People who are bored by Gothic churches would not love the mosque of
Ibn-Tulun. No longer is it used for worship. It contains no praying
life. Abandoned, bare, and devoid of all lovely ornament, it stands
like some hoary patriarch, naked and calm, waiting its destined end
without impatience and without fear. It is a fatalistic mosque, and is
impressive, like a fatalistic man. The great court of it, three
hundred feet square, with pointed arches supported by piers, double,
and on the side looking toward Mecca quintuple arcades, has a great
dignity of sombre simplicity. Not grace, not a light elegance of
soaring beauty, but massiveness and heavy strength are distinguishing
features of this mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting
cupola that stands in the middle of the court lack the charm that
belongs to so many of the fountains of Cairo.
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