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A DESERTED SELJUK COLLEGE 179
A good deal of rug- and carpet-weaving goes on
in this Kaisariyeh country. The art comes also
into daily life, and reveals itself in strange places
and when least expected. When I first saw an
irregular patch of carpet pattern worked on the
seat of a peasant's white cotton breeches, I thought
it a botching attempt at repair ; but noticing similar
patches on other breeches, I recognised them then as
an expression of art and entitled to respect. I heard
that they were experiments—studies of patterns, as
one might say. The custom is also followed on the
pannier-like horse-hair bags called hahes, which are
thrown across the backs of horses ;
and any bullockcart
loaded with grain shows that each sack has two
or three such irregular patches of pattern, the fugitive
careless efforts of instinctive art.
Soon after midday I came upon one of those
characteristic Seljuk buildings which ever convey the
idea that the race was far advanced in learning and
the arts. It was a little medresse or college, standing
solitary by the wayside, with no other building of
any kind in sight. Beside its western wall ran the
sandy road, where half a dozen buffalo-carts had unyoked,
and their awkward black beasts were lying
at rest. The building was an oblong, whose greater
length scarcely exceeded a hundred feet. Much of
it was in almost perfect condition, and its yellowish
smooth-hewn masonry looked almost as fresh and new
as when erected many centuries ago. At the angles
of its northern end were two low octagonal towers,
like roofless minarets, and between them a recessed
portico with doors ; the other fronts were massive
walls of clean stone-work, twenty-five or thirty feet
in height, each pierced with two or three small windows
high above ground. The doors were blocked
up, but a glimpse of the interior which could be had
showed the cloistered courtyard, open to the sky,
with cells for students along the cloisters. The
college had long been abandoned, and stood now,