The "Garden" Is The Most Elaborate Part Of The Mosque.
Little can be
said in its praise by day, when it bears the same relation to a
second-rate church in Rome as an English chapel-of-ease to Westminster
Abbey.
It is a space of about eighty feet in length, tawdrily decorated
so as to resemble a garden. The carpets are flowered, and the pediments
of the columns are cased with bright green tiles, and adorned to the
height of a man with gaudy and unnatural vegetation in arabesque. It is
disfigured by handsome branched candelabras of cut crystal, the work, I
believe, of a London house, and presented to the shrine by the late
Abbas Pasha of Egypt.[FN#24]
The only admirable feature of the view is the light
[p.313] cast by the windows of stained glass[FN#25] in the Southern
wall. Its peculiar background, the railing of the tomb, a splendid
filigree-work of green and polished brass, gilt or made to resemble
gold, looks more picturesque near than at a distance, when it suggests
the idea of a gigantic bird-cage. But at night the eye, dazzled by
oil-lamps[FN#26] suspended from the roof, by huge wax candles, and by
smaller illuminations falling upon crowds of visitors in handsome
attire, with the richest and the noblest of the city sitting in
congregation when service is performed,[FN#27] becomes less critical.
Still the scene must be viewed with Moslem bias, and until a man is
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the East, the last place the
Rauzah will remind him of, is that which the architect primarily
intended it to resemble-a garden.
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