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To the Reader 5
worship and a club, a building in which they could not
understand a Christian's wishing to enter for any purpose
except the assertion of the right to intrude. Yet the mosques
of Cairo are among the flowers of the earth. They are
as rich in colour and variety as the blossoms of the garden
and the field. They look as if they might have been grown
and not been built by hands ; they are full of fine curves
and gracious flourishes ; and all through the Arab city they
spring beside one's path,
I do not know how many mosques I have entered and
perused in Cairo. It must be fifty, it may be a hundred
or two hundred. I know them as familiarly as men and
women. I scan their gentle and lovable features like the
faces of friends. They seem to pass the time of day to
me whenever I am in their neighbourhood.
Few types of the world's architecture are as irrespective
of age as the mosques of Cairo. I know mosques that
were building when Louis Ouinze was king, in the golden
sunset of France, which look as old as fifteenth-century
Gothic. The mosque builders did not lose their grip of
stj'le, their ideals did not fail. The mosque of El-Bordeini
has not lost the magic of Kait Bey's architecture, though
it was built two centuries later. It may justly be compared
to the delightful Stuart Gothic at Oxford, built two
centuries after medieval Gothic passed with the feudal
chivalry of England in the Wars of the Roses. In the
array of mosques marshalled before the eyes of the observer
in Cairo, he can compare the glories of a thousand years.
In El-Azhar itself, the University of the Mohammedan
world, there are inscriptions that declare the handiwork
of Gohar, the General of the Fatimides who conquered
Egypt, and, listening to the crafty son of Tallis, founded
the Oxford of the East ten stormy centuries ago.
The mosque of El-Amr is almost as old as Islam itself,
though hardly one of Amr's stones is standing on another,
and the stately colonnades of its fifteenth-century restorer
are half of them lying, like images of the Pharaohs, in the
sand.