lum 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
grey 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
sombre simplicity. Not grace, not a light elegance of soaring beauty,
but massiveness and heavy strength are distinguishing features of this
mosque. Even the octagonal basin and its protecting cupola that stands
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.

Grey it was that morning, almost as London is grey; 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 worshippers. Stern men paced upon the huge terrace just at my
feet fingering their heads, 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 greyness 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