They Are
Simply Places Where Men Assemble On Certain Anniversaries, To Pray For
The Dead.
Every Moslem family of any note has its little temple of
this kind, near to the family graves.
And there are so many of them
that now the place is become a town - and a town in the desert - that is
to say, in a place useless for any other purpose; a secure place
indeed, for we may be sure that the ground occupied by these poor
tombs runs no risk of being coveted - not even in the irreverent times
of the future. No, it is on the other side of Cairo - on the other bank
of the Nile, amongst the verdure of the palm-trees, that we must look
for the suburb in course of transformation, with its villas of the
invading foreigner, and the myriad electric lights along its motor
roads. On this side there is no such fear; the peace and desuetude are
eternal; and the winding sheet of the Arabian sands is ready always
for its burial office.
At the end of this town of the dead, the desert again opens before us
its mournful whitened expanse. On such a night as this, when the wind
blows cold and the misty moon shows like a sad opal, it looks like a
steppe under snow.
But it is a desert planted with ruins, with the ghosts of mosques; a
whole colony of high tumbling domes are scattered here at hazard on
the shifting extent of the sands.
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