The Spell of Egypt

R >> Robert Hichens >> The Spell of Egypt


As every one who visits Rome goes to St. Peter's, so every one who
visits Cairo goes to the mosque of Mohammed Ali in the citadel, a
gorgeous building in a magnificent situation, the interior of which
always makes me think of Court functions, and of the pomp of life,
rather than of prayer and self-denial. More attractive to me is the
"Blue Mosque," to which I returned again and again, enticed almost as by
the fascination of the living blue of a summer day.

This mosque, which is the mosque of Ibrahim Aga, but which is familiarly
known to its lovers as the "Blue Mosque," lies to the left of a
ramshackle street, and from the outside does not look specially
inviting. Even when I passed through its door, and stood in the court
beyond, at first I felt not its charm. All looked old and rough, unkempt
and in confusion. The red and white stripes of the walls and the arches
of the arcade, the mean little place for ablution--a pipe and a row of
brass taps--led the mind from a Neapolitan ice to a second-rate school,
and for a moment I thought of abruptly retiring and seeking more
splendid precincts. And then I looked across the court to the arcade
that lay beyond, and I saw the exquisite "love-color" of the marvellous
tiles that gives this mosque its name.

The huge pillars of this arcade are striped and ugly, but between them
shone, with an ineffable lustre, a wall of purple and blue, of purple
and blue so strong and yet so delicate that it held the eyes and drew
the body forward. If ever color calls, it calls in the blue mosque of
Ibrahim Aga. And when I had crossed the court, when I stood beside the
pulpit, with its delicious, wooden folding-doors, and studied the tiles
of which this wonderful wall is composed, I found them as lovely near as
they are lovely far off. From a distance they resemble a Nature effect,
are almost like a bit of Southern sea or of sky, a fragment of gleaming
Mediterranean seen through the pillars of a loggia, or of Sicilian blue
watching over Etna in the long summer days. When one is close to them,
they are a miracle of art. The background of them is a milky white upon
which is an elaborate pattern of purple and blue, generally conventional
and representative of no known object, but occasionally showing tall
trees somewhat resembling cypresses. But it is impossible in words
adequately to describe the effect of these tiles, and of the tiles that
line to the very roof the tomb-house on the right of the court. They
are like a cry of ecstasy going up in this otherwise not very beautiful
mosque; they make it unforgettable, they draw you back to it again and
yet again. On the darkest day of winter they set something of summer
there. In the saddest moment they proclaim the fact that there is joy
in the world, that there was joy in the hearts of creative artists years
upon years ago. If you are ever in Cairo, and sink into depression, go
to the "Blue Mosque" and see if it does not have upon you an uplifting
moral effect. And then, if you like go on from it to the Gamia El
Movayad, sometimes called El Ahmar, "The Red," where you will find
greater glories, though no greater fascination; for the tiles hold their
own among all the wonders of Cairo.

Outside the "Red Mosque," by its imposing and lofty wall, there is
always an assemblage of people, for prayers go up in this mosque,
ablutions are made there, and the floor of the arcade is often
covered with men studying the Koran, calmly meditating, or prostrating
themselves in prayer. And so there is a great coming and going up the
outside stairs and through the wonderful doorway: beggars crouch
under the wall of the terrace; the sellers of cakes, of syrups and
lemon-water, and of the big and luscious watermelons that are so
popular in Cairo, display their wares beneath awnings of orange-colored
sackcloth, or in the full glare of the sun, and, their prayers
comfortably completed or perhaps not yet begun, the worshippers stand to
gossip, or sit to smoke their pipes, before going on their way into the
city or the mosque. There are noise and perpetual movement here. Stand
for a while to gain an impression from them before you mount the steps
and pass into the spacious peace beyond.

Orientals must surely revel in contrasts. There is no tumult like the
tumult in certain of their market-places. There is no peace like the
peace in certain of their mosques. Even without the slippers carefully
tied over your boots you would walk softly, gingerly, in the mosque of
El Movayad, the mosque of the columns and the garden. For once within
the door you have taken wings and flown from the city, you are in a
haven where the most delicious calm seems floating like an atmosphere.
Through a lofty colonnade you come into the mosque, and find yourself
beneath a magnificently ornamental wooden roof, the general effect of
which is of deep brown and gold, though there are deftly introduced
many touches of very fine red and strong, luminous blue. The walls are
covered with gold and superb marbles, and there are many quotations
from the Koran in Arab lettering heavy with gold. The great doors are
of chiseled bronze and of wood. In the distance is a sultan's tomb,
surmounted by a high and beautiful cupola, and pierced with windows of
jeweled glass. But the attraction of this place of prayer comes less
from its magnificence, from the shining of its gold, and the gleaming of
its many-colored marbles, than from its spaciousness, its airiness, its
still seclusion, and its garden. Mohammedans love fountains and shady
places, as can surely love them only those who carry in their minds a
remembrance of the desert. They love to have flowers blowing beside them
while they pray. And with the immensely high and crenelated walls of
this mosque long ago they set a fountain of pure white marble, covered
it with a shelter of limestone, and planted trees and flowers about it.
There beneath palms and tall eucalyptus-trees even on this misty day of
the winter, roses were blooming, pinks scented the air, and great red
flowers, that looked like emblems of passion, stared upward almost
fiercely, as if searching for the sun. As I stood there among the
worshippers in the wide colonnade, near the exquisitely carved pulpit
in the shadow of which an old man who looked like Abraham was swaying to
and fro and whispering his prayers, I thought of Omar Khayyam and how he
would have loved this garden. But instead of water from the white marble
fountain, he would have desired a cup of wine to drink beneath the
boughs of the sheltering trees. And he could not have joined without
doubt or fear in the fervent devotions of the undoubting men, who came
here to steep their wills in the great will that flowed about them like
the ocean about little islets of the sea.

From the "Red Mosque" I went to the great mosque of El-Azhar, to
the wonderful mosque of Sultan Hassan, which unfortunately was being
repaired and could not be properly seen, though the examination of
the old portal covered with silver, gold, and brass, the general
color-effect of which is a delicious dull green, repaid me for my visit,
and to the exquisitely graceful tomb-mosque of Kait Bey, which is beyond
the city walls. But though I visited these, and many other mosques and
tombs, including the tombs of the Khalifas, and the extremely smart
modern tombs of the family of the present Khedive of Egypt, no building
dedicated to worship, or to the cult of the dead, left a more lasting
impression upon my mind than the Coptic church of Abu Sergius, or Abu
Sargah, which stands in the desolate and strangely antique quarter
called "Old Cairo." Old indeed it seems, almost terribly old. Silent and
desolate is it, untouched by the vivid life of the rich and prosperous
Egypt of to-day, a place of sad dreams, a place of ghosts, a place of
living spectres. I went to it alone. Any companion, however dreary,
would have tarnished the perfection of the impression Old Cairo and its
Coptic church can give to the lonely traveller.

I descended to a gigantic door of palm-wood which was set in an old
brick arch. This door upon the outside was sheeted with iron. When it
opened, I left behind me the world I knew, the world that belongs to us
of to-day, with its animation, its impetus, its flashing changes, its
sweeping hurry and "go." I stepped at once into, surely, some moldering
century long hidden in the dark womb of the forgotten past. The door
of palm-wood closed, and I found myself in a sort of deserted town,
of narrow, empty streets, beetling archways, tall houses built of grey
bricks, which looked as if they had turned gradually grey, as hair does
on an aged head. Very, very tall were these houses. They all appeared
horribly, almost indecently, old. As I stood and stared at them, I
remembered a story of a Russian friend of mine, a landed proprietor,
on whose country estate dwelt a peasant woman who lived to be over a
hundred. Each year when he came from Petersburg, this old woman arrived
to salute him. At last she was a hundred and four, and, when he left his
estate for the winter, she bade him good-bye for ever. For ever! But,
lo! the next year there she still was--one hundred and five years old,
deeply ashamed and full of apologies for being still alive. "I cannot
help it," she said. "I ought no longer to be here, but it seems I do not
know anything. I do not know even how to die!" The grey, tall houses
of Old Cairo do not know how to die. So there they stand, showing their
haggard facades, which are broken by protruding, worm-eaten, wooden
lattices not unlike the shaggy, protuberant eyebrows which sometimes
sprout above bleared eyes that have seen too much. No one looked out
from these lattices. Was there, could there be, any life behind them?
Did they conceal harems of centenarian women with wrinkled faces,
and corrugated necks and hands? Here and there drooped down a string
terminating in a lamp covered with minute dust, that wavered in the
wintry wind which stole tremulously between the houses. And the houses
seemed to be leaning forward, as if they were fain to touch each other
and leave no place for the wind, as if they would blot out the exiguous
alleys so that no life should ever venture to stir through them again.
Did the eyes of the Virgin Mary, did the baby eyes of the Christ Child,
ever gaze upon these buildings? One could almost believe it. One could
almost believe that already these buildings were there when, fleeing
from the wrath of Herod, Mother and Child sought the shelter of the
crypt of Abu Sargah.

I went on, walking with precaution, and presently I saw a man. He was
sitting collapsed beneath an archway, and he looked older than
the world. He was clad in what seemed like a sort of cataract of
multi-colored rags. An enormous white beard flowed down over his
shrunken breast. His face was a mass of yellow wrinkles. His eyes were
closed. His yellow fingers were twined about a wooden staff. Above his
head was drawn a patched hood. Was he alive or dead? I could not tell,
and I passed him on tiptoe. And going always with precaution between the
tall, grey houses and beneath the lowering arches, I came at last to the
Coptic church.

Near it, in the street, were several Copts--large, fat, yellow-skinned,
apparently sleeping, in attitudes that made them look like bundles. I
woke one up, and asked to see the church. He stared, changed slowly from
a bundle to a standing man, went away and presently, returning with a
key and a pale, intelligent-looking youth, admitted me into one of the
strangest buildings it was ever my lot to enter.

The average Coptic church is far less fascinating than the average
mosque, but the church of Abu Sargah is like no other church that I
visited in Egypt. Its aspect of hoary age makes it strangely, almost
thrillingly impressive. Now and then, in going about the world, one
comes across a human being, like the white-bearded man beneath the
arch, who might be a thousand years old, two thousand, anything, whose
appearance suggests that he or she, perhaps, was of the company which
was driven out of Eden, but that the expulsion was not recorded. And now
and then one happens upon a building that creates the same impression.
Such a building is this church. It is known and recorded that more than
a thousand years ago it had a patriarch whose name was Shenuti; but it
is supposed to have been built long before that time, and parts of it
look as if they had been set up at the very beginning of things. The
walls are dingy and whitewashed. The wooden roof is peaked, with many
cross-beams. High up on the walls are several small square lattices of
wood. The floor is of discolored stone. Everywhere one sees wood wrought
into lattices, crumbling carpets that look almost as frail and brittle
and fatigued as wrappings of mummies, and worn-out matting that
would surely become as the dust if one set his feet hard upon it. The
structure of the building is basilican, and it contains some strange
carvings of the Last Supper, the Nativity, and St. Demetrius. Around the
nave there are monolithic columns of white marble, and one column of
the red and shining granite that is found in such quantities at Assuan.
There are three altars in three chapels facing toward the East. Coptic
monks and nuns are renowned for their austerity of life, and their
almost fierce zeal in fasting and in prayer, and in Coptic churches
the services are sometimes so long that the worshippers, who are almost
perpetually standing, use crutches for their support. In their churches
there always seems to me to be a cold and austere atmosphere, far
different from the atmosphere of the mosques or of any Roman Catholic
church. It sometimes rather repels me, and generally make me feel
either dull or sad. But in this immensely old church of Abu Sargah the
atmosphere of melancholy aids the imagination.

In Coptic churches there is generally a great deal of woodwork made into
lattices, and into the screens which mark the divisions, usually four,
but occasionally five, which each church contains, and, which are set
apart for the altar, for the priests, singers, and ministrants, for
the male portion of the congregation, and for the women, who sit by
themselves. These divisions, so different from the wide spaciousness and
airiness of the mosques, where only pillars and columns partly break
up the perspective, give to Coptic buildings an air of secrecy and of
mystery, which, however, is often rather repellent than alluring. In the
high wooden lattices there are narrow doors, and in the division which
contains the altar the door is concealed by a curtain embroidered with
a large cross. The Mohammedans who created the mosques showed marvellous
taste. Copts are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and
there in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near to
a matted dais, droops a hideous banner, red, purple, and yellow, with a
white cross. Peeping in, through an oblong aperture, one sees a sort of
minute circus, in the form of a half-moon, containing a table with an
ugly red-and-white striped cloth. There the Eucharist, which must be
preceded by confession, is celebrated. The pulpit is of rosewood, inlaid
with ivory and ebony, and in what is called the "haikal-screen" there
are some fine specimens of carved ebony.

As I wandered about over the tattered carpets and the crumbling matting,
under the peaked roof, as I looked up at the flat-roofed galleries, or
examined the sculpture and ivory mosaics that, bleared by the passing
of centuries, seemed to be fading away under my very eyes, as upon every
side I was confronted by the hoary wooden lattices in which the dust
found a home and rested undisturbed, and as I thought of the narrow
alleys of grey and silent dwellings through which I had come to this
strange and melancholy "Temple of the Father," I seemed to feel upon my
breast the weight of the years that had passed since pious hands erected
this home of prayer in which now no one was praying. But I had yet to
receive another and a deeper impression of solemnity and heavy silence.
By a staircase I descended to the crypt, which lies beneath the choir of
the church, and there, surrounded by columns of venerable marble, beside
an altar, I stood on the very spot where, according to tradition, the
Virgin Mary soothed the Christ Child to sleep in the dark night. And, as
I stood there, I felt that the tradition was a true one, and that there
indeed had stayed the wondrous Child and the Holy Mother long, how long
ago.

The pale, intelligent Coptic youth, who had followed me everywhere,
and who now stood like a statue gazing upon me with his lustrous eyes,
murmured in English, "This is a very good place; this most interestin'
place in Cairo."

Certainly it is a place one can never forget. For it holds in its dusty
arms--what? Something impalpable, something ineffable, something strange
as death, spectral, cold, yet exciting, something that seems to creep
into it out of the distant past and to whisper: "I am here. I am not
utterly dead. Still I have a voice and can murmur to you, eyes and can
regard you, a soul and can, if only for a moment, be your companion in
this sad, yet sacred, place."

Contrast is the salt, the pepper, too, of life, and one of the great
joys of travel is that at will one can command contrast. From silence
one can plunge into noise, from stillness one can hasten to movement,
from the strangeness and the wonder of the antique past one can step
into the brilliance, the gaiety, the vivid animation of the present.
From Babylon one can go to Bulak; and on to Bab Zouweleh, with its
crying children, its veiled women, its cake-sellers, its fruiterers, its
turbaned Ethiopians, its black Nubians, and almost fair Egyptians;
one can visit the bazaars, or on a market morning spend an hour at
Shareh-el-Gamaleyeh, watching the disdainful camels pass, soft-footed,
along the shadowy streets, and the flat-nosed African negroes, with
their almost purple-black skins, their bulging eyes, in which yellow
lights are caught, and their huge hands with turned-back thumbs, count
their gains, or yell their disappointment over a bargain from which
they have come out not victors, but vanquished. If in Cairo there are
melancholy, and silence, and antiquity, in Cairo may be found also
places of intense animation, of almost frantic bustle, of uproar that
cries to heaven. To Bulak still come the high-prowed boats of the
Nile, with striped sails bellying before a fair wind, to unload their
merchandise. From the Delta they bring thousands of panniers of fruit,
and from Upper Egypt and from Nubia all manner of strange and precious
things which are absorbed into the great bazaars of the city, and are
sold to many a traveller at prices which, to put it mildly, bring to the
sellers a good return. For in Egypt if one leave his heart, he leaves
also not seldom his skin. The goblin men of the great goblin market of
Cairo take all, and remain unsatisfied and calling for more. I said, in
a former chapter, that no fierce demands for money fell upon my ears.
But I confess, when I said it, that I had forgotten certain bazaars of
Cairo.

But what matters it? He who has drunk Nile waters must return. The
golden country calls him; the mosques with their marble columns, their
blue tiles, their stern-faced worshippers; the narrow streets with their
tall houses, their latticed windows, their peeping eyes looking down on
the life that flows beneath and can never be truly tasted; the Pyramids
with their bases in the sand and their pointed summits somewhere near
the stars; the Sphinx with its face that is like the enigma of human
life; the great river that flows by the tombs and the temples; the great
desert that girdles it with a golden girdle.

Egypt calls--even across the space of the world; and across the space
of the world he who knows it is ready to come, obedient to its summons,
because in thrall to the eternal fascination of the "land of sand,
and ruins, and gold"; the land of the charmed serpent, the land of the
afterglow, that may fade away from the sky above the mountains of Libya,
but that fades never from the memory of one who has seen it from the
base of some great column, or the top of some mighty pylon; the land
that has a spell--wonderful, beautiful Egypt.