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Our Dragoman 89
the seventeenth century, still used in out-of-the-way parts of
Italy for making wine.
Many small mosques are always kept shut, and even the
persistent Ali, who questioned every one in the street, could
not always discover where the key was kept. And they did
not always have overshoes to go over your boots, which
implied taking off your boots. And they were not invariably
interesting when you had succeeded, with much loss of time,
in getting them open. But there is generally something
ancient or beautiful in every mosque-interior in Cairo ; and
the smaller mosques sometimes do not follow the accepted
pattern, but break out in their own way, like that mosque of
Abu-Bekr. They are apt to have very beautiful ineshrebiya
work, and sometimes you come across a fine old pulpit or a
delightful courtyard.
We used to have the same fun at most of them over
our mosque-tickets. Admission to mosques for ordinary
Christians is by little brown tickets, which you buy at Cook's
or any of the large hotels for fivepence—two piastres each.
But as an author with proper introductions and writing a
book about Egypt, I had received from the head of the
Wakfs, who look after the Mohammedan monuments, a
printed letter admitting me to all their mosques and monuments
free, with permission to photograph or sketch. The
difficulty was that, even at quite large mosques, the attendants
at the gate could seldom read ; so we had to wait while some
one who could read, and whom the attendants could trust,
was found. They did not like foregoing the little brown
tickets, which meant fivepences for the mosque treasury. So
badly educated were the attendants that I had been going
to all sorts of mosques—including El-Azhar itself— for two or
three months before it was discovered that the clerk who filled
in my pass had dated it from November 1907 to May 1907,
which, of course, made it invalid from the first of December.
Ali was very useful over this question of tickets. He
always told the incredulous attendants a long list of mosques,
from El-Azhar downwards, where the pass had been accepted,
and forced them to send for some one who could read.