After that, every day for months Omar might have been seen sitting on the step at the feet of the scribe, laboriously penning quirls and dots and dashes, and learning to form them into words. Gradually he came to know the meaning of the texts written in white and gold on the green and blue tiles of the mosque, and to love the place as he never had before.
It was a pleasant school, under the sky. In the center was a beautiful covered fountain with a tiled roof resting on white columns. The doors of the mosque were of dull green bronze, and its walls were a blend of ivory and apricot-tinted marbles, with rich tiles let into them. Beyond the gateway of the court a white minaret shot toward the turquoise sky, and an old plane tree covered with button balls harbored hundreds of pigeons which drifted down to the court in search of food.
WRITING FOR THOSE WHO DID NOT KNOW HOW
The mosque had a quaint story, too. The Sultan Bajesid, who built it to be buried in, was a stingy man, and although he wished the mosque to be very beautiful, the money gave out long before it was finished; so the people of Constantinople were asked to contribute. One poor widow, who had nothing to give but a pair of pigeons, brought them as her offering. The Sultan was pleased, and ordered that the birds be left in the court as an example of generosity. That was four hundred years ago, and now the gray pigeons, descendants of the original pair, hover in clouds about the mosque and give it its name. But though the old Sultan was a miser, he was no coward. In token of that, when he was at last buried in his mosque, his people placed under his arm a brick made of the dust shaken from his garments—a sign that he had been no slacker, but had fought in the dust of battle.
‘That was Bajesid’s idea of playing the game,’ said the scribe. ‘Now, your battle is to learn to read and write, and you must not be a slacker either if you use Bajesid’s mosque as a schoolhouse.’
When Omar was not learning these things from the old Turk, he was studying the signs on the shops and the numbers on the street cars. He had no paper or books, but he copied letters and figures on bits of brick and plaster, and worked hard.
One day he saw a man, poorly dressed and carrying a package, looking anxiously at the signs over the bazaars. Now and then he stopped people to show them a written paper, but they shook their heads and hurried on, for they could not read. Omar approached the man shyly.
‘Let me see if I can read it,’ he said. As he looked at the characters they seemed alive, for he had studied the same words and numbers on a signboard in another part of the city.
‘Yes, I know what it means and will take you to the place,’ said Omar.