Filled with the religious spell of the place, Michael wound his way through the different class-rooms into which the colonnade was divided, class-rooms which so little resembled the class-rooms of his own school or Oxford, that unless he had known what was going on, it would not have dawned on him that the various professors and teachers were delivering their lectures and instructing their scholars. The divisions of the class-rooms were merely an unwritten law; there was no boundary-line. Here and there groups of students, seated on the floor of the immense colonnade, which was supported on the inner side by columns of superb proportions, were waiting for their masters. Here and there a professor had already arrived; he was standing close to a column with his pupils grouped round him, just as the village-children surrounded their native teacher in a desert school.
Out of the eleven thousand pupils who attend the university every year not one of them would receive any instruction which would enable him to earn his living, or take his place in the struggle for wealth and power in the ordinary world of mankind. Devotion to Islam, and a desire to enter into a fuller understanding of God through the teachings of the Koran, alone brought them together from far and near.
Michael knew his way and presently he found himself in the residential quarter of the university and outside a partition which divided the small bare room of the man he had come to see from that of his fellow-students. The room or cell was empty, except for one praying-mat and a shelf, which was close to the floor. On it was a copy of the Koran and some religious books bound in paper. In the wall of this narrow living-room there was an opening which led into another cell; a tall man would have had to bend almost double to pass under it. The small recess served as a bedroom.
Michael gently pulled a bell, whose chain hung against the iron grating which fronted the humble abode. As it sounded, an emaciated figure appeared under the arched aperture and a sonorous voice cried out in Arabic, "Peace be with you."
Michael, who knew that this Moslem greeting is reserved for all true believers, for members of the Islamic brotherhood, that it is rarely, if ever, offered to Christians, thought that the old man had not seen him, that his gracious salutation was for one of his own faith. He did not venture to return it in the prescribed Moslem fashion, "On you be peace and the mercy of God and His Blessing." He merely waited for a few moments, until the bent figure stood upright, and the dark eyes in the thin face met his own.
"It is you, O my son. I have long looked for you."
Michael's heart warmed with happiness. Then the Moslem greeting had been for him. He felt that peace was with him.
"I seek your counsel, O my father."
"May Allah counsel me and bring you prosperity." A lean arm, a mere bone covered with a sun-tanned skin, reached for a key which was hanging from a nail in the wall. Without speaking, he unlocked the gate. Michael noticed the fleshlessness of the fingers and wrist.
"Enter, my son, if it so please you to honour my humble abode."