Among The Four Hundred
And Fifty Or Five Hundred Columns, Which Form The Enclosure, I Found Not
Any Two Capitals Or Bases Exactly Alike:
The capitals are of coarse
Saracen workmanship; some of them, which had served for former
buildings, by the ignorance of the workmen have been placed upside down
upon the shafts.
I observed about half a dozen marble bases of good
Grecian workmanship. A few of the marble columns bear Arabic or Cufic
inscriptions, in which I read the dates 863 and 762. (A.H). A column on
the east side exhibits a very ancient Cufic inscription, somewhat
defaced, which I could neither read nor copy. Those shafts, formed of
the Mekka stone, cut principally from the side of the mountain near the
Shebeyka quarter, are mostly in three pieces, but the marble shafts are
in one piece. Some of the columns are strengthened with broad iron rings
or bands, as in many other Saracen buildings of the East: they were
first employed here by Ibn Dhaher Berkouk, King of Egypt, in rebuilding
the mosque, which had been destroyed by fire in A. H. 802.
This temple has been so often ruined and repaired, that no traces of
remote antiquity are to be found about it. On the inside of the great
wall which encloses the colonnades, a single Arabic inscription is seen,
in large characters, but containing merely the names of Mohammed and his
immediate successors: Abou Beker, Omar, Othman, and Aly. The name of
Allah, in large characters, occurs also in several places. On the
outside, over the gates, are long inscriptions, in the Solouth
character, commemorating the names of those by whom the gates were
built, long and minute details of which are given by the historians of
Mekka. The inscription on the south side, over Bab
[p.136] Ibrahim, is most conspicuous; all that side was rebuilt by the
Egyptian Sultan El Ghoury, in A.H. 906. Over the Bab Aly and Bab Abbas
is a long inscription, also in the Solouth character, placed there by
Sultan Murad Ibn Soleyman, in A.H. 984, after he had repaired the whole
building. Kotobeddyn has given this inscription at length; it occupies
several pages in his history, and is a monument of the Sultan's vanity.
This side of the mosque having escaped destruction in 1626, the
inscription remains uninjured.
Some parts of the walls and arches are gaudily painted, in stripes of
yellow, red, and blue, as are also the minarets. Paintings of flowers,
in the usual Muselman style, are no where seen; the floors of the
colonnades are paved with large stones badly cemented together.
Seven paved causeways lead from the colonnades towards the Kaaba, or
holy house, in the centre. They are of sufficient breadth to admit four
or five persons to walk abreast, and they are elevated about nine inches
above the ground. Between these causeways, which are covered with fine
gravel or sand, grass appears growing in several places, produced by the
Zemzem water dozing out of the jars, which are placed in the ground in
long rows during the day. The whole area of the mosque is upon a lower
level than any of the streets surrounding it. There is a descent of
eight or ten steps from the gates on the north side into the platform of
the colonnade, and of three or four steps from the gates, on the south
side.
Towards the middle of this area stands the Kaaba; it is one hundred and
fifteen paces from the north colonnade, and eighty-eight from the south.
For this want of symmetry we may readily account, the Kaaba having
existed prior to the mosque, which was built around it, and enlarged at
different periods. The Kaaba is an oblong massive structure, eighteen
paces in length, fourteen in breadth, and from thirty-five to forty feet
in height. I took the bearing of one of its longest sides, and found it
to be N.N.W. 1/2 W. It is constructed of the grey Mekka stone, in large
blocks of different sizes, joined together in a very rough manner, and
with bad cement. It was entirely rebuilt as it now stands in A.D. 1627:
the torrent, in the preceding year, had thrown down three of its sides;
and preparatory to its re-erection, the fourth
[p.137] side was, according to Asamy, pulled down, after the olemas, or
learned divines, had been consulted on the question, whether mortals
might be permitted to destroy any part of the holy edifice without
incurring the charge of sacrilege and infidelity.
The Kaaba stands upon a base two feet in height, which presents a sharp
inclined plane; its roof being flat, it has at a distance the appearance
of a perfect cube. The only door which affords entrance, and which is
opened but two or three times in the year, is on the north side, and
about seven feet above the ground. In entering it, therefore, wooden
steps are used - of them I shall speak hereafter. In the first periods of
Islam, however, when it was rebuilt in A.H. 64, by Ibn Zebeyr, chief of
Mekka, the nephew of Aysha, it had two doors even with the ground-floor
of the mosque. The present door (which, according to Azraky, was brought
hither from Constantinople in 1633) is wholly coated with silver, and
has several gilt ornaments. Upon its threshold are placed every night
various small lighted wax candles, and perfuming-pans, filled with musk,
aloe-wood, &c.
At the North-east corner of the Kaaba, near the door, is the famous
"Black Stone;" it forms a part of the sharp angle of the building, at
four or five feet above the ground. It is an irregular oval, about seven
inches in diameter, with an undulated surface, composed of about a dozen
smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with
a small quantity of cement, and perfectly smoothed:
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