Queer Things About Egypt | Page 8

conducts you through a magnificent old street lined on both sides with ancient Arab mansions, and containing the lovely medi?|val baths of Sultan Beshtak, still in use, to the back of the El-Merdani mosque, five centuries old, the most gracious in all Cairo, with its wide gateways revealing its sunny court and the antique glories of its sanctuary.
In the Haret-es-Merdani is the old mansion whose court-yard artists love to paint. For one side of it is rich with all the architectural graces of the Arabsa���its Mak'ad or open hall, has three great arches rising to the roof, a recessed doorway, almost as lofty, at the head of the steps which lead up from the court, and a balcony graced with two pavilions of meshrebiya for the harem ladies: its windows are screened with old woodwork, and its walls are arabesqued. At El-Merdani this joins the Sharia-el-Tabbana, the continuation of the Sharia-el-Magar, the finest of the three approaches. For that starts on the ridge, between the procession of old mosques which leads up from Sultan Hassan's mosque to the gate of the Citadel, and the lordly medi?|val cemetery called the Tombs of the Caliphs, whose shrines, stretching into the desert, form the most beautiful and romantic vision in the kingdom of Arabian art.
From this point the road leads swiftly down past mosque after mosque, mansion after mansiona���fantastic creations, mostly like Ibrahim Agha's (called the Blue Mosque from the old Persian tiles which line its spacious sanctuary), mellowed by the hands of time and decay into lines of exquisite softness.
The Kitchmas mosque, perfect, and of the fifteenth century, is built across the street. As you round it you come on a vision hardly less lovely than the Tombs of the Caliphs. For there, below you, capped by the fantastic minarets of the old El-Muayyad mosque, profiled against the blue Egyptian sky, is the Bab-es-Suweyla gatea���the heart of ancient Cairo.
Here you can put off Europe and modernity as the worshipper, entering the mosque beside the gate, puts off his shoes. For in the Sukkariya, the broad road spanned by the gatea���though it is vulgarised by European haberdashery, you are never out of sight of one of its noble mosques and sebils. The street, in Arab fashion, changes its name twice or thrice before you reach the Sudanese bazar, with its painted chests and leopard skins, and turn up to the vast and ancient precincts of El-Azhar, the thousand-year-old university of all Islam.
Step across the Muski, and for a while the spell is broken, for, though the Khordaguiya is guarded at its entrance by an ancient mosque, and has on its left the narrow-laned bazar, crowded with veiled women, where the goldsmiths are forging their delicate filigree over charcoal flames, this street, and the brass market at its end, have intrusions of foreigners and foreign wares flowing out of the Khan-il-Khalil,1 the great bazar on the right, where the sellers of carpets, embroideries, precious stones, laces, and antiquities arrange their wares in foreign ways for the foreigners to buy.
1 A fascinating place, where I have bargained for whole days.
You are soon through this nightmare and back in your pleasant dream of the Middle Ages in the Mosque land of El-Nahassin, the most romantic highway of antiquity in all Cairo. The Muristan and mosque of Sultan Kala??n, the mosque and tomb of Sultan En-Nasr, the mosque of Sultan Bark??k, and the old sheikh's house beyonda���where else is such a thicket of the flowers of old Arab architecture to be found? This majestic cluster of mosques has a Gothic richness and a Gothic gateway, a captive from Acre; the exquisite minarets present a diapering of hoary stone, like the handiwork of the lacemaker or the chaser of precious metals. And, within, there is every antique grace, from the ruins in the hospital of Kala??n and the tomb of En-Nasr to the resurrection of medi?|val art, from its ashes in Kala??n's mosque, and the imperishable splendour of the fifteenth century.
There are the ruins of a Caliph's palace opposite and other old mosques beyonda���El-Hakim itself, indeed, and the mighty wall and gates of the age of Saladin; but we must turn up to the Beit-el-Kadi, with the only five-arched Mak'ad in Cairo. Was it not the palace of the Grand Cadi, and of the Caliphs of El-Kahira before him?
Turning our backs on this, we are soon in the Gamaliya, the stronghold of Cairo medi?|valism, the street which delights the heart of the Arab. At its entrance, look where you will, you see noble old Mameluke palaces overshadowing the street, with their ranges of harem oriels screened with the old brown pierced woodwork of their meshrebiya. Here is a ruined mosque; there is a stately fountain; there one of the ancient gates for closing the ends of streets at