Before The Mosques, Which Are Raised Like Altars, There Is Always A
Flight Of Steps With A Balustrade Of White Marble.
From the door one
gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep shadow.
Once inside there
are corridors, astonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a kind
of half gloom; immediately on entering one experiences a sense of
coolness and pervading peace; they prepare you as it were, and you
begin to be filled with a spirit of devotion, and instinctively to
speak low. In the narrow street outside there was the clamorous uproar
of an Oriental crowd, cries of sellers, and the noise of humble old-
world trading; men and beasts jostled you; there seemed a scarcity of
air beneath those so numerous overhanging mushrabiyas. But here
suddenly there is silence, broken only by the vague murmur of prayers
and the sweet songs of birds; there is silence too, and the sense of
open space, in the holy garden enclosed within high walls; and again
in the sanctuary, resplendent in its quiet and restful magnificence.
Few people as a rule frequent the mosques, except of course at the
hours of the five services of the day. In a few chosen corners,
particularly cool and shady, some greybeards isolate themselves to
read from morning till night the holy books and to ponder the thought
of approaching death: they may be seen there in their white turbans,
with their white beards and grave faces. And there may be, too, some
few poor homeless outcasts, who are come to seek the hospitality of
Allah, and sleep, careless of the morrow, stretched to their full
length on mats.
The peculiar charm of the gardens of the mosques, which are often very
extensive, is that they are so jealously enclosed within their high
walls - crowned always with stone trefoils - which completely shut out
the hubbub of the outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown there for
some hundred years perhaps, rise from the ground, either separately or
in superb clusters, and temper the light of the always hot sun on the
rose-trees and the flowering hibiscus. There is no noise in the
gardens, any more than in the cloisters, for people walk there in
sandals and with measured tread. And there are Edens, too, for the
birds, who live and sing therein in complete security, even during the
services, attracted by the little troughs which the imams fill for
their benefit each morning with water from the Nile.
As for the mosque itself it is rarely closed on all sides as are those
in the countries of the more sombre Islam of the north. Here in Egypt
- since there is no real winter and scarcely ever any rain - one of the
sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden; and the
sanctuary is separated from the verdure and the roses only by a simple
colonnade. Thus the faithful grouped beneath the palm-trees can pray
there equally as well as in the interior of the mosque, since they can
see, between the arches, the holy Mihrab.[*]
[*] The Mihrab is a kind of portico indicating the direction of Mecca.
It is placed at the end of each mosque, as the altar is in our
churches, and the faithful are supposed to face it when they pray.
Oh! this sanctuary seen from the silent garden, this sanctuary in
which the pale gold gleams on the old ceiling of cedarwood, and
mosaics of mother-of-pearl shine on the walls as if they were
embroideries of silver that had been hung there.
There is no faience as in the mosques of Turkey or of Iran. Here it is
the triumph of patient mosaic. Mother-of-pearl of all colours, all
kinds of marble and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces,
precise and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs,
which, never borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form
of any animal, recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may
be seen under the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the
Mihrab which is decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally
little columns of lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from
it, framing mosaics so delicate that they look like brocades of fine
lace. In the old ceilings of cedarwood, where the singing birds of the
neighbourhood have their nests, the golds mingle with some most
exquisite colourings, which time has taken care to soften and to blend
together. And here and there very fine and long consoles of sculptured
wood seem to fall, as it were, from the beams and hang upon the walls
like stalactites; and these consoles, too, in past times, have been
carefully coloured and gilded. As for the columns, always dissimilar,
some of amaranth-coloured marble, others of dark green, others again
of red porphyry, with capitals of every conceivable style, they are
come from far, from the night of the ages, from the religious
struggles of an earlier time and testify to the prodigious past which
this valley of the Nile, narrow as it is, and encompassed by the
desert, has known. They were formerly perhaps in the temples of the
pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of Egypt and of
ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of the early
Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs, and the
images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine aureole.
They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms, at
hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously in
these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the
thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes that
men when they pray should conceive Allah as immaterial, a Spirit
without form and without feature.
Each one of these mosques has its sainted dead, whose name it bears,
and who sleeps by its side, in an adjoining mortuary kiosk; some
priest rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a khedive of
earlier times, or a soldier, or a martyr.
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