e most important
Mohammedan college in the world; for though it has no longer the twenty
thousand students who crowded its courts in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, there is still an annual attendance of from seven
to ten thousand; by some authorities the number is given as twelve
thousand. The twelve thousand have no academic groves; they have not
even one tree. There is nothing sequestered about El Azhar; it is near
the bazaars in the old part of the town, where the houses are crowded
together like wasps' nests. One sees nothing of it as one approaches
save the minarets above, and in the narrow, crowded lane an outer
portal. Here the visitor must show his permit and put on the
mosque-shoes, for El Azhar was once a mosque, and is now mosque and
university combined. After the shoes are on he steps over the low bar,
and finds himself within the porch, which is a marvel as it stands, with
its fretwork, carved stones, faded reds, and those old plaques of
inscription which excite one's curiosity so desperately, and which no
dragoman can ever translate, no matter in how many languages he can
complacently ask, "You satisfi?" One soon learns something of the older
tongue; hieroglyphics are not difficult; any one with eyes can discover
after a while that the A of the ancient Egyptians is, often, a bird who
bears a strong resemblance to a pigeon; that their L is a lion; and that
the name of the builder of the Great Pyramid, for instance, is
represented by a design which looks like two freshly hatched chickens, a
football, and a horned lizard (speaking, of course, respectfully of them
all). But one can never find out the meaning of the tantalizing
characters, so many thousand years nearer our own day, which confront
us, surrounded by arabesques, over old Cairo gateways, across the fronts
of the street fountains, or inscribed in faded gilt on the crumbling
walls of mosques. It is probable that they are Kufic, and one would
hardly demand, I suppose, that an English guide should read
black-letter? But who can be reasonable in the land of Aladdin's Lamp?

The porch leads to the large central court, which is open to the sky,
the breeze, and the birds; and this last is not merely a possibility,
for birds of all kinds are numerous in Egypt, and unmolested. On the
pavement of this court, squatting in groups, are hundreds of the
turbaned students, some studying aloud, some reading aloud (it is always
aloud), some listening to a p