Egypt and Its Monuments

by Robert Hichens

In the bazaars is the passion for gain, in the alleys of music and light is the passion for pleasure, in the mosques is the passion for prayer that connects the souls of men with the unseen but strongly felt world. Each of these passions is old, each of these passions in the heart of Islam is fierce. On my return to Cairo I sought for the hidden fire that is magic in the dusky places of prayer.

A mist lay over the city as I stood in a narrow byway, and gazed up at a heavy lattice, of which the decayed and blackened wood seemed on guard before some tragic or weary secret. Before me was the entrance to the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, older than any mosque in Cairo save only the mosque of Amru. It is approached by a flight of steps, on each side of which stand old, impenetrable houses. Above my head, strung across from one house to the other, were many little red and yellow flags ornamented with gold lozenges. These were to bear witness that in a couple of days’ time, from the great open place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the Sacred Carpet was to set out on its long journey to Mecca. My guide struck on a door and uttered a fierce cry. A small shutter in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl, with kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse, black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished, drawing the shutter to behind her. The mist crept up about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a moment I was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun.

I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a piece of waste ground, flanked on the right by an old, mysterious wall, and on the left by the long wall of the mosque, from which close to me rose a gray, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it seemed to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it forever with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching the mosque, was such a house as one can see only in the East—fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous windows like windows in the slum of a town set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In this building once dwelt the High Priest of the mosque. This dwelling, the ancient wall, the gray minaret with its motionless bird, the lamentable waste ground at my feet, prepared me rightly to appreciate the bit of old Cairo I had come to see.

People who are bored by Gothic churches would not love the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. No longer is it used for worship. It contains no praying life. Abandoned, bare, and devoid of all lovely ornament, it stands like some hoary patriarch, naked and calm, waiting its destined end without impatience and without fear. It is a fatalistic mosque, and is impressive, like a fatalistic man. The great court of it, three hundred feet square, with pointed arches supported by piers, double, and on the side looking toward Mecca quintuple arcades, has a great dignity of somber simplicity. Not grace, not a light elegance or soaring beauty, but massiveness and heavy strength are the distinguishing features of this mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting cupola that stand in the middle of the court lack the charm that belongs to so many of the fountains of Cairo. There are two minarets, the minaret of the bird, and a larger one, approached by a big stairway up which, so my dragoman told me, a Sultan whose name I have forgotten loved to ride his favorite horse. Upon the summit of this minaret I stood for a long time, looking down over the city.

Gray it was that morning, almost as London is gray; but the sounds that came up softly to my ears out of the mist were not the sounds of London. Those many minarets, almost like columns of fog rising above the cupolas, spoke to me of the East even upon this sad and sunless morning. Once from where I was standing at the time appointed went forth the call to prayer, and in the barren court beneath me there were crowds of ardent worshipers. Stern men paced upon the huge terrace just at my feet fingering their beads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the grayness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, “I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth.” Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy and squat houses built with gray bricks, seems less old than this mosque of Ibn-Tulun. For its long façade is striped with white and apricot, and there are lebbek-trees growing in its court near the two columns between which if you can pass you are assured of heaven. But the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, seen upon a sad day, makes a powerful impression, and from the summit of its minaret you are summoned by the many minarets of Cairo to make the pilgrimage of the mosques, to pass from the “broken arches” of these Saracenic cloisters to the “Blue Mosque,” the “Red Mosque,” the mosques of Mohammed Ali, of Sultan Hassan, of Kait Bey, of El-Azhar, and so on to the Coptic church that is the silent center of “old Cairo.” It is said that there are over four hundred mosques in Cairo. As I looked down from the minaret of Ibn-Tulun, they called me through the mist that blotted completely out all the surrounding country, as if it would concentrate my attention upon the places of prayer during these holy days when the pilgrims were crowding in to depart with the Holy Carpet. And I went down by the staircase of the horse, and in the mist I made my pilgrimage.

As every one who visits Rome goes to St. Peter’s, so every one who visits Cairo goes to the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the citadel, a gorgeous building in a magnificent situation, the interior of which always makes me think of court functions, and of the pomp of life, rather than of prayer and self-denial. More attractive to me is the “Blue Mosque,” to which I returned again and again, enticed almost as by the fascination of the living blue of a summer sky.

This mosque, which is the mosque of Ibrahim Aga, but which is familiarly known to its lovers as the “Blue Mosque,” lies to the left of a ramshackle street, and from the outside does not look specially inviting. Even when I passed through its door, and stood in the court beyond, at first I felt not its charm. All looked old and rough, unkempt and in confusion. The red and white stripes of the walls and the arches of the arcade, the mean little place for ablution,—a pipe and a row of brass taps,—led the mind from a Neapolitan ice to a second-rate school, and for a moment I thought of abruptly retiring and seeking more splendid precincts. And then I looked across the court to the arcade that lay beyond, and I saw the exquisite “love color” of the marvelous tiles that gives this mosque its name.

The huge pillars of this arcade are striped and ugly, but between them shone, with an ineffable luster, a wall of purple and blue, of purple and blue so strong and yet so delicate that it held the eyes and drew the body forward. If ever color calls, it calls in the blue mosque of Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed the court, when I stood beside the pulpit, with its delicious, wooden folding-doors, and studied the tiles of which this wonderful wall is composed, I found them as lovely near as they are lovely far off. From a distance they resemble a nature effect, are almost like a bit of Southern sea or of sky, a fragment of gleaming Mediterranean seen through the pillars of a loggia, or of Sicilian blue watching over Etna in the long summer days. When one is close to them, they are a miracle of art. The background of them is a milky white upon which is an elaborate pattern of purple and blue, generally conventional and representative of no known object, but occasionally showing tall trees somewhat resembling cypresses. But it is impossible in words adequately to describe the effect of these tiles, and of the tiles that line to the very roof the tomb-house on the right of the court. They are like a cry of ecstasy going up in this otherwise not very beautiful mosque; they make it unforgetable, they draw you back to it again and yet again. On the darkest day of winter they set something of summer there. In the saddest moment they proclaim the fact that there is joy in the world, that there was joy in the hearts of creative artists years upon years ago. If you are ever in Cairo, and sink into depression, go to the “Blue Mosque” and see if it does not have upon you an uplifting moral effect. And then, if you like, go on from it to the Gamia El Movayad, sometimes called El Ahmar, “The Red,” where you will find greater glories, though no greater fascination; for the tiles hold their own among all the wonders of Cairo.

Outside the “Red Mosque,” by its imposing and lofty wall, there is always an assemblage of people, for prayers go up in this mosque, ablutions are made there, and the floor of the arcade is often covered with men studying the Koran, calmly meditating, or prostrating themselves in prayer. And so there is a great coming and going up the outside stairs and through the wonderful doorway: beggars crouch under the wall of the terrace; the sellers of cakes, of syrups and lemon water, and of the big and luscious watermelons that are so popular in Cairo, display their wares beneath awnings of orange-colored sackcloth, or in the full glare of the sun, and, their prayers comfortably completed or perhaps not yet begun, the worshipers stand to gossip, or sit to smoke their pipes, before going on their way into the city or the mosque. There are noise and perpetual movement here. Stand for a while to gain an impression from them before you mount the steps and pass into the spacious peace beyond.

Orientals must surely revel in contrasts. There is no tumult like the tumult in certain of their marketplaces. There is no peace like the peace in certain of their mosques. Even without the slippers carefully tied over your boots you would walk softly, gingerly, in the mosque of El Movayad, the mosque of the columns and the garden. For once within the door you have taken wings and flown from the city, you are in a haven where the most delicious calm seems floating like an atmosphere. Through a lofty colonnade you come into the mosque, and find yourself beneath a magnificently ornamental wooden roof, the general effect of which is of deep brown and gold, though there are deftly introduced many touches of very fine red and strong, luminous blue. The walls are covered with gold and superb marbles, and there are many quotations from the Koran in Arab lettering heavy with gold. The great doors are of chiseled bronze and of wood. In the distance is a sultan’s tomb, surmounted by a high and beautiful cupola, and pierced with windows of jeweled glass. But the attraction of this place of prayer comes less from its magnificence, from the shining of its gold, and the gleaming of its many-colored marbles, than from its spaciousness, its airiness, its still seclusion, and its garden. Mohammedans love fountains and shady places, as can surely love them only those who carry in their minds a remembrance of the desert. They love to have flowers blowing beside them while they pray. And within the immensely high and crenelated walls of this mosque long ago they set a fountain of pure-white marble, covered it with a shelter of limestone, and planted trees and flowers about it. There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-trees even on this misty day of the winter, roses were blooming, pinks scented the air, and great red flowers, that looked like emblems of passion, stared upward almost fiercely, as if searching for the sun. As I stood there among the worshipers in the wide colonnade, near the exquisitely carved pulpit in the shadow of which an old man who looked like Abraham was swaying to and fro and whispering his prayers, I thought of Omar Khayyam and how he would have loved this garden. But instead of water from the white marble fountain, he would have desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the boughs of the sheltering trees. And he could not have joined without doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the undoubting men, who came here to steep their wills in the great will that flowed about them like the ocean about little islets of the sea.