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The Mosques of Cairo 183
for regular worship—and its evidences of superstition and
pilgrimage.
What could be more pathetic than the sort of antique
altar, with its two little columns worn into holes the size of a
cuttle-fish because generations of mothers have rubbed those
spots with lemon so that their babies might cry when their
mouths were held to it ; for if they went away from Amr's
Mosque without a cry they might be dumb ?
Close by the entrance again are a pair of columns so close
that a man can hardly squeeze through them. Every good
Mohammedan was supposed to squeeze through them. When
the custom was prevalent many miracles must have been
needed if adipose was as common in the Cairo Arab as it is
to-day.
Outside this grand old mosque is only a low whitewashed
wall with two plaster minarets like stumpy lighthouses.
Such a poor old red-and-white striped affair, so modern.
One is unprepared for that fierce Kairwan square and that
forest of noble arches behind.
I have purposely left to the end the mosque which of
all those in Cairo itself comes nearest to our preconceived
ideas, that of Kait Bey in the city, not to be confused with
his exquisite mosque out in the Tombs of the Caliphs.
It is difficult to find. It lies away behind the mosque
of Ibn Tulun, whose long battlemented wall has to be
skirted. After this you find yourself in an old street with
the best overhanging mesJirebiyad harem windows in Cairo.
Few foreigners must visit it, for the people in the quarter,
which is a very low one, almost mob a stranger yelling
for bakshish. But when you do get to the mosque you
are amply repaid : it is the most perfect in conception
and condition of all the fifteenth-century mosques of Cairo
and is the most richly decorated.
It is the Mohammedan-renaissance type of mosque,
resembling the inandara or reception-hall of a palace,
with a cupola over the diwkda in the centre, a liwdn at
each end, and hardly any colonnading at the sides ; the
floor of its durkda is resplendent with tessellated marbles ;