THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO
They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, and this great town,
which covers some twelve miles of plain, might well be called a city of
mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient Cairo, of the Cairo of
the Arabs. The new Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of “Semiramis
Hotels,” does not deserve to be mentioned except with a smile.)
A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. They follow one another along
the streets, sometimes two, three, four in a row; leaning one against
the other, so that their confines become merged. On all sides their
minarets shoot up into the air, those minarets embellished with
arabesques, carved and complicated with the most changing fancy. They
have their little balconies, their rows of little columns; they are so
fashioned that the daylight shows through them. Some are far away in the
distance; others quite close, pointing straight into the sky above our
heads. No matter where one looks--as far as the eye can see--still there
are others; all of the same familiar colour, a brown turning into rose.
The most ancient of them, those of the old easy-tempered times, bristle
with shafts of wood, placed there as resting-places for the great free
birds of the air, and vultures and ravens may always be seen perched
there, contemplating the horizon of the sands, the line of the yellow
solitudes.
Three thousand mosques! Their great straight walls, a little severe
perhaps, and scarcely pierced by their tiny ogive windows, rise above
the height of the neighbouring houses. These walls are of the same brown
colour as the minarets, except that they are painted with horizontal
stripes of an old red, which has been faded by the sun; and they are
crowned invariably with a series of trefoils, after the fashion
of battlements, but trefoils which in every case are different and
surprising.
Before the mosques, which are raised like altars, there is always a
flight of steps with a balustrade of white marble. From the door one
gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep shadow. Once inside there
are corridors, astonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a kind of
half gloom; immediately on entering one experiences a sense of coolness
and pervading peace; they prepare you as it were, and you begin to be
filled with a spirit of devotion, and instinctively to speak low. In
the narrow street outside there was the clamorous uproar of an Oriental
crowd, cries of sellers, and the noise of humble old-world trading; men
and beasts jostled you; there seemed a scarcity of air beneath those so
numerous overhanging mushrabiyas. But here suddenly there is silence,
broken only by the vague murmur of prayers and the sweet songs of birds;
there is silence too, and the sense of open space, in the holy garden
enclosed within high walls; and again in the sanctuary, resplendent in
its quiet and restful magnificence. Few people as a rule frequent the
mosques, except of course at the hours of the five services of the day.
In a few chosen corners, particularly cool and shady, some greybeards
isolate themselves to read from morning till night the holy books and to
ponder the thought of approaching death: they may be seen there in their
white turbans, with their white beards and grave faces. And there may
be, too, some few poor homeless outcasts, who are come to seek the
hospitality of Allah, and sleep, careless of the morrow, stretched to
their full length on mats.
The peculiar charm of the gardens of the mosques, which are often very
extensive, is that they are so jealously enclosed within their high
walls--crowned always with stone trefoils--which completely shut out the
hubbub of the outer world. Palm-trees, which have grown there for some
hundred years perhaps, rise from the ground, either separately or in
superb clusters, and temper the light of the always hot sun on the
rose-trees and the flowering hibiscus. There is no noise in the gardens,
any more than in the cloisters, for people walk there in sandals and
with measured tread. And there are Edens, too, for the birds, who
live and sing therein in complete security, even during the services,
attracted by the little troughs which the imams fill for their benefit
each morning with water from the Nile.
As for the mosque itself it is rarely closed on all sides as are
those in the countries of the more sombre Islam of the north. Here in
Egypt--since there is no real winter and scarcely ever any rain--one of
the sides of the mosque is left completely open to the garden; and the
sanctuary is separated from the verdure and the roses only by a simple
colonnade. Thus the faithful grouped beneath the palm-trees can pray
there equally as well as in the interior of the mosque, since they can
see, between the arches, the holy Mihrab.[*]
[*] The Mihrab is a kind of portico indicating the direction
of Mecca. It is placed at the end of each mosque, as the
altar is in our churches, and the faithful are supposed to
face it when they pray.
Oh! this sanctuary seen from the silent garden, this sanctuary in which
the pale gold gleams on the old ceiling of cedarwood, and mosaics of
mother-of-pearl shine on the walls as if they were embroideries of
silver that had been hung there.
There is no faience as in the mosques of Turkey or of Iran. Here it is
the triumph of patient mosaic. Mother-of-pearl of all colours, all kinds
of marble and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces, precise
and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs, which, never
borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form of any animal,
recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may be seen under
the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the Mihrab which is
decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally little columns of
lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from it, framing mosaics so
delicate that they look like brocades of fine lace. In the old ceilings
of cedarwood, where the singing birds of the neighbourhood have their
nests, the golds mingle with some most exquisite colourings, which time
has taken care to soften and to blend together. And here and there very
fine and long consoles of sculptured wood seem to fall, as it were, from
the beams and hang upon the walls like stalactites; and these consoles,
too, in past times, have been carefully coloured and gilded. As for the
columns, always dissimilar, some of amaranth-coloured marble, others
of dark green, others again of red porphyry, with capitals of every
conceivable style, they are come from far, from the night 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 rubies and sapphires. And the birds, you
may be sure, have their nests also in the house of the holy one.
They are wont indeed to soil the carpets and the mats on which the
worshippers kneel, and their nests are so many blots up there amid the
gildings of the carved cedarwood; but then their song, the symphony that
issues from that aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to the
dead who dream. . . .
*****
But yet, when all is said, these mosques seem somehow to be wanting.
They do not wholly satisfy you. The access to them perhaps is too easy,
and one feels too near to the modern quarters of the town, where the
hotels are full of visitors--so that at any moment, it seems, the spell
may be broken by the entry of a batch of Cook's tourists, armed with
the inevitable _Baedeker_. Alas! they are the mosques of Cairo, of
poor Cairo, that is invaded and profaned. The memory turns to those of
Morocco, so jealously guarded, to those of Persia, even to those of Old
Stamboul, where the shroud of Islam envelops you in silence and gently
bows your shoulders as soon as you cross their thresholds.
And yet what pains are being taken to-day to preserve these mosques,
which in olden times were such delightful retreats. Neglected for whole
centuries, never repaired, notwithstanding the veneration of their
heedless worshippers, the greater part of them were fallen into ruin;
the fine woodwork of their interiors had become worm-eaten, their
cupolas were cracked and their mosaics covered the floor as with a hail
of mother-of-pearl, of porphyry and marble. It seemed that to repair
all this was a task incapable of fulfilment; it was sheer folly, people
said, to conceive the idea of it.
Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an army of workers has been at
the task, sculptors, marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of
the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely
renovated. After having re-echoed for some years to the sounds of
hammers and chisels, during the course of these vast renovations, they
are restored now to peace and to prayer, and the birds have recommenced
to build their nests in them.
It will be the glory of the present reign that it has preserved, before
it was too late, all this magnificent legacy of Moslem art. When the
city of “The Arabian Nights,” which was formerly there, shall have
entirely disappeared, to give place to a vulgar _entrepot_ of commerce
and of pleasure, to which the plutocracy of the whole world comes every
winter to disport itself, so much at least will remain to bear testimony
to the lofty and magnificent thought that inspired the earlier Arab
life. These mosques will continue to remain into the distant future,
even when men shall have ceased to pray in them, and the winged guests
shall have departed, for the want of those troughs of water from the
Nile, filled for them by the good imams, whose hospitality they repay
by making heard in the courts, beneath the arched roofs, beneath the
ceilings of cedarwood, the sweet, piping music of birds.