More Attractive To Me Is The
"Blue Mosque," To Which I Returned Again And Again, Enticed Almost As
By The Fascination Of The Living Blue Of A Summer Day.
This mosque, which is the mosque of Ibrahim Aga, but which is
familiarly known to its lovers as the "Blue Mosque," lies to the left
of a ramshackle street, and from the outside does not look specially
inviting.
Even when I passed through its door, and stood in the court
beyond, at first I felt not its charm. All looked old and rough,
unkempt and in confusion. The red and white stripes of the walls and
the arches of the arcade, the mean little place for ablution - a pipe
and a row of brass taps - led the mind from a Neapolitan ice to a
second-rate school, and for a moment I thought of abruptly retiring
and seeking more splendid precincts. And then I looked across the
court to the arcade that lay beyond, and I saw the exquisite "love-
color" of the marvellous tiles that gives this mosque its name.
The huge pillars of this arcade are striped and ugly, but between them
shone, with an ineffable lustre, a wall of purple and blue, of purple
and blue so strong and yet so delicate that it held the eyes and drew
the body forward. If ever color calls, it calls in the blue mosque of
Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed the court, when I stood beside the
pulpit, with its delicious, wooden folding-doors, and studied the
tiles of which this wonderful wall is composed, I found them as lovely
near as they are lovely far off.
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