Once past the threshold of the double ornamented door we enter the
courtyard, at this moment empty as the desert and dazzling with
sunshine. Beyond, quite open, the mosque spreads out its endless
arcades, which are continued and repeated till they are lost in the
gloom of the far interior, and in this dim place, with its perplexing
depths, innumerable people in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are
singing, or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking time as it were
to their declamation by a slight rhythmic swaying from the hips. They
are the ten thousand students come from all parts of the world to absorb
the changeless doctrine of El-Azhar.

At the first view it is difficult to distinguish them, for they are far
down in the shadow, and out here we are almost blinded by the sun. In
little attentive groups of from ten to twenty, seated on mats around a
grave professor, they docilely repeat their lessons, which in the course
of centuries have grown old without changing like Islam itself. And we
wonder how those in the circles down there, in the aisles at the
bottom where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can see to read the old
difficult writings in the pages of their books.

In any case, let us not trouble them--as so many tourists nowadays do
not hesitate to do; we will enter a little later, when the studies of
the morning are over.

This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now pours its white fire,
is an enclosure severely and magnificently Arab; it has isolated us
suddenly from time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer what
formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian. It is vast as a
tournament list; confined on one side by the mosque itself, and on the