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Updated: June 5, 2025
A brawling river ran over a rocky bed in cataracts down its midst. Crags rose abruptly a little in front of us. Half-way up the slope to the left, on a ledge of rock, rose a long, low building with curious, pyramid-like roofs, crowned at either end by a sort of minaret, which resembled more than anything else a huge earthenware oil-jar. This was the monastery or lamasery we had come so far to see.
So ran the rich landscape, broken only by belts of olive trees, to the far hills of Judea. Riding on over the long, low swells, fragrant with wild thyme and camomile, we saw at last the tower of Ramleh, and down the valley, an hour's ride to the north-east, the minaret of Ludd, the ancient Lydda. Still further, I could see the houses of the village of Sharon, embowered in olives.
Some fifteen minutes' riding, with no slackening of the pace and always on an upward grade toward what seemed the central citadel of Jannati Shahr, brought the party to an inner wall, forty feet high and pierced by a triple-arched gate surmounted by a minaret of golden lacery. Through the center arch rode Bara Miyan, now reining into a canter.
The book of the law provided that he should go to the very same minaret, and that Ahmet must station himself at the very same place where he had stood when his arm was broken; and that he might jump down and break Ahmet's arm. "But be it understood," concluded the Cadi, "if you break his leg instead of his arm, Ahmet will have the right to delegate some one to jump down on you to break your leg."
Let us turn first to the East, for it still retains its primitive music, and at this very hour some muezzin is calling from his minaret or some Jew intoning his Talmud in the same musical cadence with which Syrian maidens sang the hymns to Cybele.
I will italicize some of his words: "The mausoleum stands on a raised marble platform at each of whose corners rises a tall and slender minaret of graceful proportions and of exquisite beauty. Beyond the platform stretch the two wings, one of which is itself a mosque of great architectural merit.
And once more she laughed when the sun had gone down, and the mooddin had come out on the Grand Mosque in the Metamar, and he asked if she could see the old blind man in the minaret, where he was crying, "God is great! God is great!" "Can you see him, little one?" said Israel. "See him?" said Naomi; "why yes, you dear old father, of course I can see him.
From the white roof many things could be seen besides the immense monotonous dunes along whose ridges orange fire seemed to play unceasingly against the sky. There was the roof of the Zaouïa mosque, with its low, white domes grouped round the minaret, as somewhere below the youngest boys of the school grouped round the taleb, or teacher.
"We must see if we cannot supply that want at Jerusalem." Papa's interest in the subject was thoroughly waking up. We lunched at Ramleh. How present it is to me, those hours we spent there. The olive groves and orchards and cornfields, the palms and figs, the prickly-pear hedges, the sweet breath of the air. And after our luncheon we stayed to examine the ruins and the minaret.
But the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, seen upon a sad day, makes a powerful impression, and from the summit of its minaret you are summoned by the many minarets of Cairo to make the pilgrimage of the mosques, to pass from the "broken arches" of these Saracenic cloisters to the "Blue Mosque," the "Red Mosque," the mosques of Mohammed Ali, of Sultan Hassan, of Kait Bey, of El-Azhar, and so on to the Coptic church that is the silent centre of "old Cairo."
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