Defend Yourselves Against
This Disintegrating Invasion - Not By Force, Be It Understood, Not By
Inhospitality Or Ill-Humour - But By Disdaining This Occidental
Rubbish, This Last Year's Frippery By Which You Are Inundated.
Try to
preserve not only your traditions and your admirable Arab language,
but also the grace and mystery that used to characterise your town,
the refined luxury of your dwelling-houses.
It is not a question now
of a poet's fancy; your national dignity is at stake. You are
/Orientals/ - I pronounce respectfully that word, which implies a whole
past of early civilisation, of unmingled greatness - but in a few
years, unless you are on your guard, you will have become mere
Levantine brokers, exclusively preoccupied with the price of land and
the rise in cotton."
CHAPTER III
THE MOSQUES OF CAIRO
They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, and this great town,
which covers some twelve miles of plain, might well be called a city
of mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient Cairo, of the Cairo of
the Arabs. The new Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of "Semiramis
Hotels," does not deserve to be mentioned except with a smile.)
A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. They follow one another
along the streets, sometimes two, three, four in a row; leaning one
against the other, so that their confines become merged. On all sides
their minarets shoot up into the air, those minarets embellished with
arabesques, carved and complicated with the most changing fancy. They
have their little balconies, their rows of little columns; they are so
fashioned that the daylight shows through them. Some are far away in
the distance; others quite close, pointing straight into the sky above
our heads. No matter where one looks - as far as the eye can see - still
there are others; all of the same familiar colour, a brown turning
into rose. The most ancient of them, those of the old easy-tempered
times, bristle with shafts of wood, placed there as resting-places for
the great free birds of the air, and vultures and ravens may always be
seen perched there, contemplating the horizon of the sands, the line
of the yellow solitudes.
Three thousand mosques! Their great straight walls, a little severe
perhaps, and scarcely pierced by their tiny ogive windows, rise above
the height of the neighbouring houses. These walls are of the same
brown colour as the minarets, except that they are painted with
horizontal stripes of an old red, which has been faded by the sun; and
they are crowned invariably with a series of trefoils, after the
fashion of battlements, but trefoils which in every case are different
and surprising.
Before the mosques, which are raised like altars, there is always a
flight of steps with a balustrade of white marble. From the door one
gets a glimpse of the calm interior in deep shadow. Once inside there
are corridors, astonishingly lofty, sonorous and enveloped in a kind
of half gloom; immediately on entering one experiences a sense of
coolness and pervading peace; they prepare you as it were, and you
begin to be filled with a spirit of devotion, and instinctively to
speak low.
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