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Updated: June 17, 2025
Knowing that the first day's ride was a long one, some forty miles over an indifferent road and with second-rate animals, I was anxious to leave the city as soon as the gates were opened. Right above my head the mueddin in the minaret overlooking the Tin House called the sleeping city to its earliest prayer.
There is the hard, white light of the daytime, five minutes of lavender and running shadows, and then the purple blackness of the night. The mueddin took his place on the minaret of the mosque. His shadow ran to the centre of the square and stopped.
She flashed across the quadrangle and vanished through one of the archways, even as the distant voice of a Mueddin broke plaintively upon the brooding stillness reciting the Shehad "La illaha, illa Allah! Wa Muhammad er Rasool Allah!" A slave spread a carpet, a second held a great silver bowl, into which a third poured water.
"You forget that there is a mosque almost opposite," he said. "That is the mueddin!" His son laughed shortly. "My nerves are not yet all that they might be," he explained, and bending low began to examine the pavement. "There must be a trap-door in the floor?" he continued. "Don't you think so?"
The Makam el Hanefy, which is the largest, being fifteen paces by eight, is open on all sides, and supported by twelve small pillars; it has an upper story, also open, where the Mueddin who calls to prayers, takes his stand. Near their respective Makams, the adherents of the four different sects seat themselves for prayers.
I watched the procession wind its way out of sight to the burial-ground by the mosque, whose mueddin would greet its arrival with the cry, "May Allah have mercy upon him." Then the dead man would be carried to the cemetery, laid on his right side looking towards Mecca, and the shroud would be untied, that there may be no awkwardness or delay upon the day of the Resurrection.
He signed manifests, received money, receipted for it, felt of surcingles, tightened them, swore at the boys who were teasing the camels, kicked Ali whenever he came within reach, and in every way played the rôle of the business man of the desert. Suddenly, from the minaret of the mosque came the cry of the mueddin.
It was foolish, perhaps a woman's vagrant fancy but she wished he had mounted with her. It was noon in the desert. The voice of the Mueddin died away on the minaret, and the golden silence that comes out of the heart of the sun sank down once more softly over everything. Nature seemed unnaturally still in the heat.
From the minaret that overlooks the mosque the mueddin calls for the evening prayer; from the side of the Kutubia Tower and the minaret of Sidi bel Abbas, as from all the lesser mosques, the cry is taken up. Lepers pass out of the city on their way to Elhara; beggars shuffle off to their dens; storks standing on the flat house-tops survey the familiar scene gravely but with interest.
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