Queer Things About Egypt | Page 7

an arcade of high beauty running round it, and the finest
view of Cairo. And just outside it is the oldest Cairo mosque—that of
Amr the victorious, who conquered Egypt for the Caliphs, and named
the city that he founded Al-Fustat, the City of the Tent. This mosque,
going back to the first century of Mohammedanism, is all that remains
of Al-Fustat, which was burnt by a twelfth-century Caliph to prevent it
falling into the hands of the Crusaders. In the mounds of sand heaped
upon its ruins by 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 liwân a noble effect.
There is no better way to enter the city of Ibn Tulun, the second part of

the mediæval 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 mosque—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 artists—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 daïses, cut off by the lofty Moorish arches which
sustained the dome. The eastern daïs 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-Kahira—the Bazar of