In The High Wooden Lattices There Are Narrow
Doors, And In The Division Which Contains The Altar The Door Is
Concealed By A Curtain Embroidered With A Large Cross.
The Mohammedans
who created the mosques showed marvellous taste.
Copts are often
lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah.
Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near to a matted dais, droops
a hideous banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a white cross. Peeping
in, through an oblong aperture, one sees a sort of minute circus, in
the form of a half-moon, containing a table with an ugly red-and-white
striped cloth. There the Eucharist, which must be preceded by
confession, is celebrated. The pulpit is of rosewood, inlaid with
ivory and ebony, and in what is called the "haikal-screen" there are
some fine specimens of carved ebony.
As I wandered about over the tattered carpets and the crumbling
matting, under the peaked roof, as I looked up at the flat-roofed
galleries, or examined the sculpture and ivory mosaics that, bleared
by the passing of centuries, seemed to be fading away under my very
eyes, as upon every side I was confronted by the hoary wooden lattices
in which the dust found a home and rested undisturbed, and as I
thought of the narrow alleys of grey and silent dwellings through
which I had come to this strange and melancholy "Temple of the
Father," I seemed to feel upon my breast the weight of the years that
had passed since pious hands erected this home of prayer in which now
no one was praying. But I had yet to receive another and a deeper
impression of solemnity and heavy silence. By a staircase I descended
to the crypt, which lies beneath the choir of the church, and there,
surrounded by columns of venerable marble, beside an altar, I stood on
the very spot where, according to tradition, the Virgin Mary soothed
the Christ Child to sleep in the dark night. And, as I stood there, I
felt that the tradition was a true one, and that there indeed had
stayed the wondrous Child and the Holy Mother long, how long ago.
The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who had followed me everywhere,
and who now stood like a statue gazing upon me with his lustrous eyes,
murmured in English, "This is a very good place; this most interestin'
place in Cairo."
Certainly it is a place one can never forget. For it holds in its
dusty arms - what? Something impalpable, something ineffable, something
strange as death, spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems
to creep into it out of the distant past and to whisper: "I am here. I
am not utterly dead. Still I have a voice and can murmur to you, eyes
and can regard you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, be your
companion in this sad, yet sacred, place."
Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one of the great
joys of travel is that at will one can command contrast. From silence
one can plunge into noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement,
from the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one can step
into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid animation of the present.
From Babylon one can go to Bulak; and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its
crying children, its veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers,
its turbaned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyptians;
one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morning spend an hour at
Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed,
along the shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, with
their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, in which yellow
lights are caught, and their huge hands with turned-back thumbs, count
their gains, or yell their disappointment over a bargain from which
they have come out not victors, but vanquished. If in Cairo there are
melancholy, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo may be found also
places of intense animation, of almost frantic bustle, of uproar that
cries to heaven. To Bulak still come the high-prowed boats of the
Nile, with striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their
merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit,
and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious
things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are
sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to
the sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he
leaves also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin
market of Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more.
I said, in a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell
upon my ears. But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten
certain bazaars of Cairo.
But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with
their tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking
down on the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the
Pyramids with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits
somewhere near the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the
enigma of human life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the
temples; the great desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.
Egypt calls - even across the space of the world; and across the space
of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its
summons, because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of
sand, and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land
of the afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains
of Libya, but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it
from the base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon;
the land that has a spell - wonderful, beautiful Egypt.
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