A
Learned Cairene Informed Me That These Spires Were Devised By The
Eccentric Monarch To Disperse, Like Large Censers, Fragrant Smoke Over
The City During The Hours Of Prayer.
The Azhar and Hasanayn[FN#14]
Mosques are simple and artless piles, celebrated for sanctity, but
remarkable for nothing save ugliness.
Few buildings, however, are
statelier in appearance,
[p.98]or give a nobler idea of both founder and architect than that
which bears Sultan Hasan's name. The stranger stands awe-struck before
walls high towering without a single break, a hypaethral court severe
in masculine beauty, a gateway that might suit the palace of the
Titans, and a lofty minaret of massive grandeur. This Mosque (finished
about A.D. 1363), with its fortress aspect, owns no more relationship
to the efforts of a later age than does Canterbury Cathedral to an
Anglo-Indian "Gothic." For dignified beauty and refined taste, the
Mosque and tomb of Kaid Bey and the other Mamluk kings are admirable.
Even in their present state, picturesqueness presides over decay, and
the traveller has seldom seen aught more striking than the rich light
of the stained glass pouring through the first shades of evening upon
the marble floor.
The modern Mosques must be visited to see Egyptian architecture in its
decline and fall. That of Sittna Zaynab (our Lady Zaynab), founded by
Murad Bey, the Mamluk, and interrupted by the French invasion, shows,
even in its completion, some lingering traces of taste. But nothing can
be more offensive than the building which every tourist flogs donkey in
his hurry to see-old Mohammed Ali's "Folly" in the citadel. Its Greek
architect has toiled to caricature a Mosque to emulate the glories of
our English "Oriental Pavilion." Outside, as Monckton Milnes sings,
"The shining minarets, thin and high,"
are so thin, so high above the lumpy domes, that they
[p.99]look like the spindles of crouching crones, and are placed in
full sight of Sultan Hasan the Giant, so as to derive all the
disadvantages of the contrast. Is the pointed arch forgotten by man,
that this hapless building should be disgraced by large and small
parallelograms of glass and wood,[FN#15] so placed and so formed as to
give its exterior the appearance of a European theatre coiffe with
Oriental cupolas? Outside as well as inside, money has been lavished
upon alabaster full of flaws; round the bases of pillars run gilt
bands; in places the walls are painted with streaks to resemble marble,
and the wood-work is overlaid with tinsel gold. After a glance at these
abominations, one cannot be surprised to hear the old men of Egypt
lament that, in spite of European education, and of prizes encouraging
geometry and architecture, modern art offers a melancholy contrast to
antiquity. It is said that H. H. Abbas Pasha proposes to erect for
himself a Mosque that shall far surpass the boast of the last
generation. I venture to hope that his architect will light the "sacred
fire" from Sultan Hasan's, not from Mohammed Ali's, Turco-Grecian
splendours.
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