ust have passed through that very door to reach the winding
staircase. As for Paul, he had been there the previous year, and was
accustomed to the sour looks of Mussulmans when a Frank visitor enters
one of their mosques. He also went in, and the kavass, who was the last
of the party, followed, pulling the door on its hinges behind him.
During several minutes they mounted the rough stone steps in silence, by
the dim light of the lantern and the taper. Then emerging into the
gallery through a narrow arch, a strange sound reached them, and
Alexander stood still for a moment.

Far down in the vast church an Imam was intoning a passage of the Koran
in a voice which hardly seemed human; indeed, such a sound is probably
not to be heard anywhere else in the world. The pitch was higher than
what is attainable by the highest men's voices elsewhere, and yet the
voice possessed the ringing, manly quality of the tenor, and its immense
volume never dwindled to the proportions of a soprano. The priest
recited and modulated in this extraordinary key, introducing all the
ornaments peculiar to the ancient Arabic chant with a facility which an
operatic singer might have envied. Then there was a moment's silence,
broken again almost immediately by a succession of heavy sounds which
can only be described as resembling rhythmical thunder, rising and
falling three times at equal intervals; another short but intense
silence, and again the voice burst out with the wild clang of a trumpet,
echoing and reverberating through the galleries and among the hundred
marble pillars of the vast temple.

The two brothers walked forward to the carved stone balustrade of the
high gallery, and gazed down from the height upon the scene below. The
multitude of worshipers surged like crested waves blown obliquely on a
shingly shore. For the apse of the Christian church is not built so
that, facing it, the true believer shall look towards Mecca, and the
Mussulmans have made their _mihrab_--their shrine--a little to the right
of what was once the altar, in the true direction of the sacred city.
The long lines of matting spread on the floor all lie evenly at an angle
with the axis of the nave, and when the mosque is full the whole
congregation, amounting to thousands of men, are drawn up like regiments
of soldiers in even ranks to face the mihrab, but not at right angles
with the nave. The effect is startling and strangely inharmonious, like
the studied distortio