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Besides this learned bibliophile, the Sultan Abou-el-Abbas brought back with him an immense booty, principally of ingots of gold, from which he took his surname of "The Golden"; and as the result of the expedition Marrakech was embellished with mosques and palaces for which the Sultan brought marble from Carrara, paying for it with loaves of sugar from the sugar-cane that the Saadians grew in the Souss.
I will show you where you live. This is Constantinople." "I live at Stamboul," said Amina, scornfully. "There is Stamboul in little letters below look." "That Stamboul! The Frank girl is false; Stamboul is a large, large, beautiful place; not a little black speck. I can see it from my lattice. White houses and mosques in the sun, and the blue Golden Horn, with the little caiques gliding."
There were mosques, temples and bazaars; there was a wild race of desert Bisharin, whose living was precarious in those days of war, since they had existed by dancing weird, wild dances for the enlightenment of tourists; there was a museum, rather a mouldy place like their kind, where were relics of ages untold, and, much to Mac's amusement, a mummified sheep.
He there built a small mosque, though not the one which commonly goes by his name. Two mosques of great antiquity and importance, but the origin of which is a matter of dispute among authorities, stand in the Haram enclosure at Jerusalem.
The city, with its countless minarets and domed mosques, its public buildings and tree-adorned squares, its section of mud-colored houses and terraced roofs, lies in the form of a crescent at the visitor's feet, while the plains of Lower Egypt stretch far away in all directions.
By its side is an iron column with contradictory stories about its origin. The tourists visited other mosques and tombs, which reminded them of the tombs of the Mamelukes. For two days longer they looked about Delhi; and Lord Tremlyn pointed out to them the scenes of the massacre, which he had described on board of the Guardian-Mother. On the train by which they had come they proceeded to Agra.
On account of the same holy season, the Royal palaces and mosques are shut; and though the Valley of the Sweet Waters is there, no one goes to walk; the people remaining asleep all day, and passing the night in feasting and carousing.
The crops are raised on it; the houses and villages are built of it; the land is manured with it; the very air is full of it. The crude brick buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified; the red pottery of Assiout is Nile mud baked hard; the village mosques and minarets are Nile mud whitewashed. I have even seen a ship's bulwarks neatly repaired with mud.
The Fatimid rulers outvied each other in embellishing Kâhira with artistic structures; this seems surprising because, on account of the charge of heresy, Kâhira was cut off from the Arabian centres of art and learning, from Bagdad, Damascus, and Cordova, and of course the artists and students, who formerly frequented the mosques, could not do so when they were in the hands of heretics.
It is fortunately quite unnecessary here to do more than point out that these mosques, whatever their origin, were in use at least as early as the eighth century, and that the beautiful Dome of the Rock must have exercised a great influence on Mohammedan art, and, notwithstanding some differences of plan, may be fairly regarded as the prototype of many of the domed mosques and tombs to which allusion has been made.
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