There was still time to go to the Wakfs ministry before it closed for the midday ‘siesta.’ ‘El Wakfs’ is the name of what we might term the Board of Religious Endowments. It is here where artists must apply for a pass to allow them to paint inside the mosques.
I fortunately found Herz Bey, the architect of the Wakfs, and he very kindly gave me what I required.
Apart from the window of Kalaûn’s mosque which would be of great use to me, its interior is one of the finest and most ornate in the whole of Cairo. I had found several subjects there in former years, and I looked forward to finding a pleasant asylum in which I could restfully do some work after the fatigue of some days of street painting.
The mosque was falling into a ruinous state when I had last entered it. Originally most gorgeous, its colouring had then been softened down by more than six centuries since en-Nasir completed the dome which covers the tomb of his father.
I also looked forward to a cooler spot than my café, for Cairo has far from cooled down during the first days of November. Though the thermometer may not register so high as in June, the damp heat during the high Nile is more felt than the greater, but dryer, temperature of early summer.
I was prepared not to find the mosque as paintable as in the earlier days,
‘Before Decay’s effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers’;
yet I was hardly prepared to find it to all appearance a brand new building. It had been admirably restored, and restoration was necessary, I have no doubt, to prevent its falling into complete ruin, as so many other monuments have done. But, alas, its poetry was gone. Nor is this likely to return so long as it is kept as a show-place merely, and only visited by the tourist or student of Saracenic architecture. The hundred and one signs which suggested the worshippers who had gathered here during the six bygone centuries were all swept away; the worn praying mats were gone, and any of the movable furniture which is not now shelved and labelled in a museum may have found its way to some dealer’s shop,—the place for which these things were designed knows them no more.
I started a large drawing, for in spite of all it is a beautiful building, and looks now in all probability very much as it looked when Nasir’s work-people left it. I worked hard at this drawing; spent whole mornings getting the intricate arabesque patterns into perspective and their relative tones; but the longer I worked the more my drawing became the lifeless perspective elevation plate of some book on architecture.