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2i6 Oriental Cairo
Individually, indeed, they sacrifice some of the charm.
The tomb mosque of Kait Bey out in the desert, admirably
restored, like his city mosque, is the best of all mosques in
Egypt to photograph. It is wonderfully beautiful; its dome
laced with arabesques is almost incomparable ; it is approached
by a noble flight of steps; its loggia is a monument of antique
grace, and its minaret is chaste and fine and royal. So
many hundred yards away the great tomb-mosque of Sultan
Barkuk is falling into sentimental decay, and has its imposing
fortress-like form flanked with charming and fantastic arcades.
Further on still are the mosques of other fifteenth-century
Sultans, deserted, locked up, almost Gothic in their habili-
ments.
But to get to these miracles of the dead Art of the Middle
Ages from the Citadel one has to pass through an unseemly
village of ghouls, who live among the dead in poor little
houses and callous commonness, to make what living they
can, I suppose, by sextoning and keeping unclean things
from tombs, and guiding visitors, or selling melons and
other native delicacies to the Arabs whose business or fancy
takes them to the cemetery of the Caliphs. This squalid
village extends its soiled arms almost to the threshold of the
grandeur of Kait Bey's Palace of the Dead.
I suppose it must be so :
in Egypt squalor always waits
on ancient State.
To examine the tombs one must approach them on foot,
donkey, or carriage from the Citadel. There are so many
that one cannot examine them all ; but Kait Bey's must
be visited as the most perfect and the most beautiful : El-
Azrafs for the charming decoration of its rather church-like
interior, and to wander through the vast ruins of the college
and the almshou.ses which surround it, and formed one of
the most celebrated institutions of their time ; and Sultan
Barkuk's because it forms a fine mosque of the open-air type
which has one side of its colonnade deepened into a liwdu.
It has, too, a fine tomb-chamber with an imposing array
of tombs, and its exterior is of a noble and uncommon type,
suggestive of one of the great square mediaeval castles of