These were to bear witness that in a couple of days'
time, from the great open place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the Sacred
Carpet was to set out on its long journey to Mecca. My guide struck on a
door and uttered a fierce cry. A small shutter in the blackened lattice
was opened, and a young girl, with kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant
yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse black hair, leaned out, held a
short parley, and vanished, drawing the shutter to behind her. The
mist crept about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on
its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came an old, fat man
bearing a mighty key. In a moment I was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun.
I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a
piece of waste ground, flanked on the right by an old, mysterious wall,
and on the left by the long wall of the mosque, from which close to
me rose a grey, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of
unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-looking
bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it seemed to
be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it for ever
with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching the mosque,
was such a house as one can see only in the East--fantastically old,
fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing
hideous windows, like windows in the slum 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.
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