Queer Things About Egypt | Page 7

the winds of the desert any one who likes can fossick for the remains of Arab pottery (all dating from before A.D. 1160), of which such glowing fragments are exhibited in the South Kensington Museum. The almost deserted mosque of Amr has a humble exterior; but, inside, the forest of antique columns, restored in the fifteenth century, give its liw?��n a noble effect.
There is no better way to enter the city of Ibn Tulun, the second part of the medi?|val city, than by walking over the mounds of Fustat, a mountainous desert in miniature, keeping on your right the aqueduct of Saladin, which might, but for its pointed arches, be the work of a Roman Emperor, and, fixing your eyes on the pageant of the Mameluke Tombs, second only to the Tombs of the Caliphs for splendour in the cemeteries of the Mohammedan world, and the Citadel crowned by the soaring Mosque of Mehemet Ali, rivalling the marvellous skyline of the Golden Horn. Behind the mosque and the tombs are the Golden Hills of the Mokattam range, with their horizon of desert broken by antique mosques, the true Citadel for Cairo.
In El-Katai, the city of Ibn Tulun, there is not a trace of the famous Golden House, for which he and his son exhausted the art, the luxury, and the imaginativeness of their times. But of Ibn Tulun's mosque only the colour and the pulpit carvings have gone, though a thousand years are beginning to tell their tale on the rich plaster tracery of the windows of the clerestory at the back of the sanctuary. The hardest stone of Gothic church-builders would have stood no longer than this marvellous stucco. The mosque is of vast extent, one of the largest in the world, and every roof and every pier is standing in its place, though it was abandoned for the very poor to fill with mud houses till the wise English rule induced the Mohammedan Wakfs to look after their monuments. It was the first mosque to employ piers instead of columns, the suggestion of a Christian slave, for otherwise every church in Egypt would have been robbed of the columns garnered from antique temples. In the centre stands the famous minaret, with an outside staircase winding round its exterior, for which Ibn Tulun twisted the design out of a piece of paper, when his architect's ingenuity ran dry.
At the back of the mosquea���if you can find your tortuous way beneath the tall, overhanging houses of the Mameluke period, whose harem windows (vast oriels decorated with old meshrebiya screens) are a delight to artistsa���lies the Mosque of Kait Bey, one of the gems of Cairo, the most perfect specimen of the period when Egyptian mosques ceased to be open cloisters, with their Eastern colonnade deepened to shelter the worshippers from the sun as they prostrated themselves before the mihrab.
The Kait Bey type of mosque was like the hall of an emir's palace, hardly longer than its height, with a richly painted roof, and windows with tiny bits of coloured glass set like gems in a delicate filigree of plaster. The sunken floor under the exquisitely graceful dome was inlaid, like the walls, in rare marbles with the choicest taste, and surrounded by four da?��ses, cut off by the lofty Moorish arches which sustained the dome. The eastern da?��s was adorned with a mihrab in delicate mosaics, and a tall pulpit with a Jacob's ladder stair of the same rare woodwork as the Coptic screens.
No part of Cairo is so rich in small ancient buildings as El-Katai. Between it and El-Kahira lie the ancient mosques and dervish tekkes of the Hilmiya and the Gamamise, leading to the palace of Sheikh Sadat, the type of the great Arab mansion, where, till he was poisoned by a would-be son-in-law a few years ago, the chief descendant of the Prophet lived. His palace is quite a castle, which has a selamlik as large as a mosque, with its lofty walls inlaid with old Persian tiles, and a range of superb oriels, screened by the richest meshrebiya, for the ladies of the harem, over a feudal gateway.
There are three approaches from El-Katai to the Bab-es-Suweyla, the chief gate of El-Kahiraa���the Bazar of the Armourers, starting by Sultan Hassan's mosque, the most majestic in Cairo; the Sharia Serougiya, a little to the left of this, and the Sharia-el-Magar, leading down from the shoulder of the Citadel hill. All of them abound in medi?|val beauties. The Sharia Serougiya takes you past a succession of little mosques with domes which are dreams of slender grace, and a few old mansions, into the busy Bazar of the Tentmakers, who embroider the awnings which render Mohammedan festivals so gay. At its end is the Bab-es-Suweyla. The S??k of the Armourers