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The tail of the kite is the Maydan, the poorest part of Damascus, but rich in ruined mosques and hammams, and houses which at first sight look as though they are in decay. But when we got to know these houses better, we found that marble courts, inlaid chambers, arabesque ceilings, often lay behind the muddy exteriors.
A poll-tax to the amount of a silver rouble, or its value in kind, is levied on every family; one tenth of the produce of the land goes into the public treasury; the property of every person dying without direct heirs, falls to the government; and the wealth accumulated in the mosques and shrines, consisting of the gifts of the pious, has been applied to the uses of the State, the mollahs receiving regular pay in exchange, and the wandering dervishes, who lived on voluntary contributions, having either been incorporated into the army or driven out of the country.
Have you made this trip before?" "Several times. I am one of the agents of the Peninsular Company." "Then you know India?" "Why yes," replied Fix, who spoke cautiously. "A curious place, this India?" "Oh, very curious. Mosques, minarets, temples, fakirs, pagodas, tigers, snakes, elephants! I hope you will have ample time to see the sights." "I hope so, Monsieur Fix.
For the rest, Bagdad would be holy enough were the walls and towers manned by Christian warriors, and the mosques converted into churches, and I king, with the caliph's treasures to go forth against the Moslem, conquering and to conquer. Oh, credit me, it is a glorious vision. But it cannot be realised. Marry, I spoke too truly when I said that I was born without luck on my side.
Of more than a hundred mosques and shrines found in Algiers when it was taken by the French, only four of the former and a small number of the latter remain, the rest having been ruthlessly turned into churches.
The meaning of this expression is obscure. Perhaps it implies that their Mahometan teachers had no mosques, because the Negroes were ignorant of the means and method of construction. The knowledge of God among the northern Negroes was assuredly due exclusively to the Mahometan missionaries. Called Gnumi-Mensa in Grynaeus.
From behind the couch, the Turk dragged a chair of ample seat, railed around except at the front, and provided with a cushion of camel's hair a chair such as teachers in the Mosques use when expounding to their classes. This he placed so while he sat on the couch the visitor would be directly before him, and but little removed. Soon the two were sitting cross-legged face to face.
In Agra and its neighborhood, and afterwards at Delhi, we saw forts, mosques, and tombs, which were built in the great days of the Mohammedan emperors, and which are marvels of cost, magnitude, and richness of materials and ornamentation, creations of surpassing grandeur, wonders which do indeed make the like things in the rest of the world seem tame and inconsequential by comparison.
Cairo consists of two distinct and widely different parts, the Esbikiyeh and Ismailieh quarters of the west end, built for and almost entirely occupied by Europeans, and the purely native town, whose streets and bazaars, mosques and palaces, have remained practically unchanged for centuries.
The want of stone put any such arrangement out of the question. We have, then, no reason to believe that their arches ever rested upon piers or upon the solid parts of walls freely pierced for the admission of light. The type from which the modern east has evolved so many fine mosques and churches was unknown in Chaldæa.
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