orientalcairocit00sladuoft

Old Cairo 199
The effect of this dark polished mysterious screening gives a
new significance to the words " dim religious light."
Al Mo'allaka is small, like that Royal Chapel of Palermo,
but its very smallness is a beauty, for it brings you near to
the dark screen crowned with golden ikons, and the antique
columns of marble taken from some Roman temple, which
break it up into the place of the women and the place of the
men and the place of the priests. Behind the glorious screen,
which goes all round the church, are various little cabinets or
chapels. One has an image of the Virgin, soft and lovely
enough for a Greuze, painted by Roman hands before the
dour Byzantine ideas crushed human outlines out of holy
faces. Another has a most curious painted cabinet with a
lamp swaying in front of it, and wooden drums like the shells
for modern artillery, containing the relics.
At every point the Hanging Church of Babylon is the
queen of all the seven churches. The apse of the sanctuary
has still its ancient richness of marble ; the baldacchini are in
the ancient basilica style, and the chief baldacchin has still its
ancient marble columns. The pulpit is, after the screen, the
gem of the whole building. More than any mosque lectern in
Cairo, it is the rival of the oldest and quaintest pulpits of
Lombard Italy. It is very long and very narrow, only just
wide enough to walk in ; it stands on fifteen delicate shafts
of rare marbles ; its panels are a medley of inlay and
bas-relief; it has hardly a straight line in it ; its colours are
melted into a harmony.
The fantastic and richly carved reading desks of Al
Mo'allaka face the screen instead of the congregation. There
is a fine old barrel roof above, bolted to open woodwork like
the timbers of a ship.
It is not easy to describe succinctly such a God's House as
the Hanging Church of Babylon. But one can never forget
the elements of its dim splendour : the antique swinging lamps
with their tiny flames, the golden ikons, the slender outlines of
the delicate marble pulpit standing out against the overpower-
ing richness of that dark screen, the low moresco arches out-
lined with ivory which lead into the sanctuary.