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156 Oriental Cairo
so low that any one could step over it at the bottom, which is
nevertheless guarded by a tall doorway with an inlaid door,
whose function is therefore purely ceremonial. This pulpit is
used for preaching ; a few yards in front of it is the dikka,
a platform for reading the Koran, which is sometimes made
of wood like the uiimbar, sometimes of white marble covered
with bas-reliefs, as at El-Moayyad. These diklcas are like the
long pulpits used in early Romanesque churches. They have
one extraordinary feature : though they may be a dozen feet
high, they have no staircase leading up to them ; they are
ascended by a common ladder.
The floor of a rich mosque is sometimes covered with a fine
Turkey carpet, but more often with simple matting. The
walls up to a considerable height should be covered with the
panelling of tessellated marbles, which the Arabs obviously
copied from the Norman buildings of Sicily, in which strips
and disks of porphyry and serpentine play a great part.
Above this panelling, instead of mosaic pictures they have
plaster carved with exquisite arabesques and inscriptions from
the Koran. Kaniariyas, windows of carved plaster set with
bits of stained glass, form another notable feature. The
northern, western, and southern recesses have their floors
cither left bare or covered with matting.
The central courtyard, like the walls, is sometimes covered
with tessellated marbles ; it is more often of glittering white
marble. In the centre usually stands a fountain of lustration
under a highly picturesque canopy. But El-Azhar has no
fountain in its courtyard, and where the courtyards are large
they are sometimes, as at the Blue Mosque, not paved.
In the fifteenth century a new type of mosque came in, in
which the college idea was generally lost, the mosque of
what we call the Kait Bey type being more in the nature of a
chapel attached to the founder's tomb. They were conse-
quently very much smaller, and, being smaller, were easy to
roof over with a cupola. The central portion of the floor,
which would have been the courtyard in one of the older
mosques, is still sunk below the level of the recesses, and
almost invariably paved with richly tessellated marbles. The