Mohammedans love fountains and shady
places, as can surely love them only those who carry in their minds a
remembrance of the desert. They love to have flowers blowing beside them
while they pray. And with the immensely high and crenelated walls of
this mosque long ago they set a fountain of pure white marble, covered
it with a shelter of limestone, and planted trees and flowers about it.
There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-trees even on this misty day of
the winter, roses were blooming, pinks scented the air, and great red
flowers, that looked like emblems of passion, stared upward almost
fiercely, as if searching for the sun. As I stood there among the
worshippers in the wide colonnade, near the exquisitely carved pulpit
in the shadow of which an old man who looked like Abraham was swaying to
and fro and whispering his prayers, I thought of Omar Khayyam and how he
would have loved this garden. But instead of water from the white marble
fountain, he would have desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the
boughs of the sheltering trees. And he could not have joined without
doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the undoubting men, who came
here to steep their wills in the great will that flowed about them like
the ocean about little islets of the sea.
From the "Red Mosque" I went to the great mosque of El-Azhar, to
the wonderful mosque of Sultan Hassan, which unfortunately was being
repaired and could not be properly seen, though the examination of
the old portal covered with silver, gold, and brass, the general
color-effect of which is a delicious dull green, repaid me for my visit,
and to the exquisitely graceful tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, which is beyond
the city walls.
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