My Guide Struck On A Door And Uttered A Fierce Cry.
A small
shutter in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl, with
kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her
coarse black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished,
drawing the shutter to behind her.
The mist crept about the tawdry
flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, and from the house
of the girl there came an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a
moment I was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun.
I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a
piece of waste ground, flanked on the right by an old, mysterious
wall, and on the left by the long wall of the mosque, from which close
to me rose a grey, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of
unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-
looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it
seemed to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it
for ever with eyes that could not see. 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. There are two minarets,
the minaret of the bird, and a larger one, approached by a big
stairway up which, so my dragoman told me, a Sultan whose name I have
forgotten loved to ride his favorite horse. Upon the summit of this
minaret I stood for a long time, looking down over the city.
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