of marble and of porphyry, cut into myriads of little pieces, precise
and equal, and put together again to form the Arab designs, which, never
borrowing from the human form, nor indeed from the form of any animal,
recall rather those infinitely varied crystals that may be seen under
the microscope in a flake of snow. It is always the Mihrab which is
decorated with the most elaborate richness; generally little columns of
lapis lazuli, intensely blue, rise in relief from it, framing mosaics so
delicate that they look like brocades of fine lace. In the old ceilings
of cedarwood, where the singing birds of the neighbourhood have their
nests, the golds mingle with some most exquisite colourings, which time
has taken care to soften and to blend together. And here and there very
fine and long consoles of sculptured wood seem to fall, as it were, from
the beams and hang upon the walls like stalactites; and these consoles,
too, in past times, have been carefully coloured and gilded. As for the
columns, always dissimilar, some of amaranth-coloured marble, others
of dark green, others again of red porphyry, with capitals of every
conceivable style, they are come from far, from the night of the ages,
from the religious struggles of an earlier time and testify to the
prodigious past which this valley of the Nile, narrow as it is, and
encompassed by the desert, has known. They were formerly perhaps in the
temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of
Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of
the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs,
and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine
aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms,
at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously
in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the
thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes that
men when they pray should conceive Allah as immaterial, a Spirit without
form and without feature.