They are almost innumerable, more than 3000, and this great town,
which covers some twelve miles of plain, might well be called a city of
mosques. (I speak, of course, of the ancient Cairo, of the Cairo of
the Arabs. The new Cairo, the Cairo of sham elegance and of "Semiramis
Hotels," does not deserve to be mentioned except with a smile.)

A city of mosques, then, as I was saying. They follow one another along
the streets, sometimes two, three, four in a row; leaning one against
the other, so that their confines become merged. On all sides their
minarets shoot up into the air, those minarets embellished with
arabesques, carved and complicated with the most changing fancy. They
have their little balconies, their rows of little columns; they are so
fashioned that the daylight shows through them. Some are far away in the
distance; others quite close, pointing straight into the sky above our
heads. No matter where one looks--as far as the eye can see--still there
are others; all of the same familiar colour, a brown turning into rose.
The most ancient of them, those of the old easy-tempered times, bristle
with shafts of wood, placed there as resting-places for the great free
birds of the air, and vultures and ravens may always be seen perched
there, contemplating the horizon of the sands, the line of the yellow
solitudes.

Three thousand mosques! Their great straight walls, a little severe
perhaps, and scarcely pierced by their tiny ogive windows, rise above
the height of the neighbouring houses. These walls are of the same brown
colour as the minarets, except that they are painted with horizontal
stripes of an old red, which has been faded by the sun; and they are
crowned invariably with a series of trefoils, after the fashion
of battlements, but trefoils which in every case are different and