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The Tombs of the Caliphs and Mamelukes 217
Italy. Still farther on visit the last great group of mosques ;
there are three of them in it, the tomb of the Sultan El-
Ghury, and the funerary mosques of Sultan Inal and the
Emir Kebir, though they seem to form one great red building,
which looks almost like a Gothic monastery with its beautiful
pointed arches. The door to this group is always locked,
but it does not signify, for there is a breach in the wall at the
back through which you can enter them. There is something
church-like even in the interior. This is not surprising: there
is no doubt that mosque architecture and church architecture
reacted upon each other on the shores of the Mediterranean,
where the intercourse between Christian and Saracen was
constant. In Tunis the oldest mosques have most of them
actually been churches, and look none the less mosque-like.
In Palermo there are old churches so like mosques—San
Giovanni degli Eremiti, the Martorana, and San Cataldo
among them—that half the people in the city believe them
to have been built as mosques, though archives prove that
they were built for the Norman kings.
There are other charming tomb-mosques and zawiyas,
perhaps a score of them, well worthy to be examined or
kodaked. But it would be idle to recapitulate them, and
indeed it is not easy to fit their names to them, because the
guides can identify only four or five of them.
The Tombs of the Caliphs have a double charm ; their
intrinsic beauty is rivalled by the matchless beauty of their
setting as they stretch along the rim of Cairo's eastern desert.
I have noted elsewhere the fact that the Moslems, ever look-
ing to Mecca, choose the desert on the Mecca side for their
tombs as they choose the eastern wall of their mosques for
their mihrabs. While the Egypt of the Pharaohs, with its
belief of Osiris dying daily in the west, put its dead under the
earth in the western desert for their passage in the Soul
Boat.
The Tombs of the Mamelukes are, as I have said, not equal
to those of the Caliphs, and their immediate setting is not so
picturesque, for they are entangled in a humble part of the
city. But viewed from above, as for example from the windows