cool
after the open court, where the sun was blazing down upon the groups of
picturesque worshippers and students, who seemed to be totally
oblivious of its heat. Some elderly men were merely meditating. It
was a wonderful sight, gracious and solemn and mysterious. The
concentration of many of the worshippers on God was so strong that they
seemed to see Him with their eyes; it was written on their faces; they
looked as if they actually belonged to God.

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