ght of the ages,
from the religious struggles of an earlier time and testify to the
prodigious past which this valley of the Nile, narrow as it is, and
encompassed by the desert, has known. They were formerly perhaps in the
temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of
Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of
the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs,
and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine
aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms,
at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously
in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the
thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes that
men when they pray should conceive Allah as immaterial, a Spirit without
form and without feature.

Each one of these mosques has its sainted dead, whose name it bears,
and who sleeps by its side, in an adjoining mortuary kiosk; some priest
rendered admirable by his virtues, or perhaps a khedive of earlier
times, or a soldier, or a martyr. And the mausoleum, which communicates
with the sanctuary by means of a long passage, sometimes open, sometimes
covered with gratings, is surmounted always by a special kind of cupola,
a very high and curious cupola, which raises itself into the sky like
some gigantic dervish hat. Above the Arab town, and even in the sand of
the neighbouring desert, these funeral domes may be seen on every side
adjoining the old mosques to which they belong. And in the evening, when
the light is failing, they suggest the odd idea that it is the dead man
himself, immensely magnified, who stands there beneath a hat that is
become immense. One can pray, if one wishes, in this resting-place of
the dead saint as well as in the mosque. Here indeed it is always more
secluded and more in shadow. It is more simple, too, at least up to the
height of a man: on a platform of white marble, more or less worn and
yellowed by the touch of pious hands, nothing more than an austere
catafalque of similar marble, ornamented merely with a Cufic
inscription. But if you raise your eyes to look at the interior of the
dome--the inside, as it were, of the strange dervish hat--you will see
shining between the clusters of painted and gilded stalactites a number
of windows of exquisite colouring, little windows that seem to be
constellations of emeralds and r