And We Wonder How Those In The Circles Down There, In The
Aisles At The Bottom Where The Daylight Scarcely Penetrates, Can See
To Read The Old Difficult Writings In The Pages Of Their Books.
In any case, let us not trouble them - as so many tourists nowadays do
not hesitate to do; we will enter a little later, when the studies of
the morning are over.
This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now pours its white
fire, is an enclosure severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated
us suddenly from time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer
what formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as
a tournament list; confined on one side by the mosque itself, and on
the others by a high wall which effectively separates it from the
outer world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by centuries of sun
into the colour of raw sienna or of bloodstone. At the bottom they are
straight, simple, a little forbidding in their austerity, but their
summits are elaborately ornamented and crowned with battlements, which
show in profile against the sky a long series of denticulated
stonework. And over this sort of reddish fretwork of the top, which
seems as if it were there as a frame to the deep blue vault above us,
we see rising up distractedly all the minarets of the neighbourhood;
and these minarets are red-coloured too, redder even than the jealous
walls, and are decorated with arabesques, pierced by the daylight and
complicated with aerial galleries. Some of them are a little distance
away; others, startlingly close, seem to scale the zenith; and all are
ravishing and strange, with their shining crescents and outstretched
shafts of wood that call to the great birds of space. Spite of
ourselves we raise our heads, fascinated by all the beauty that is in
the air; but there is only this square of marvellous sky, a sort of
limpid sapphire, set in the battlements of El-Azhar and fringed by
those audacious slender towers. We are in the religious East of olden
days and we feel how the mystery of this magnificent court - whose
architectural ornament consists merely in geometrical designs repeated
to infinity, and does not commence till quite high up on the
battlements, where the minarets point into the eternal blue - must cast
its spell upon the imagination of the young priests who are being
trained here.
*****
"He who instructs the ignorant is like a living man amongst the
dead."
"If a day passes without my having learnt something which brings me
nearer to God, let not the dawn of that day be blessed."
Verses from the Hadith.
He who has brought me to this place to-day is my friend, Mustapha
Kamel Pacha, the tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the fact
that I am not treated like a casual visitor. Our names are taken at
once to the great master of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose
pupil Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt will receive us in
person.
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