rooms: At dusk a man whose heart is pure is
sometimes permitted to see the elves who come at that hour to play
games in the inner court under the columns; here they run races, they
chase each other over the matting, they climb the pillars, and indulge
in a thousand antics. The little creatures are said to live in the
wardrobes, and each student occasionally places a few flowers within, to
avert from himself the danger that comes from their too great love of
tricks. There are other inhabitants of these rooms who also indulge in
tricks. These are little animals which I took to be ferrets; twice I had
a glimpse of a disappearing tail, like a dark flash, as I passed over a
threshold. Probably they are kept as mouse-hunters, for pets are not
allowed; if they were, it would be entertaining to note those which
would be brought hither by homesick pupils from the Somali coast, or
Yemen.

In beginning his education the first task for a boy is to commit the
Koran to memory. As he learns a portion he is taught to read and to
write those paragraphs; in this way he goes through the entire volume.
Grammar comes next; at El Azhar the word includes logic, rhetoric,
composition, versification, elocution, and other branches. Then follows
law, secular and religious. But the law, like the logic, like all the
instruction, is founded exclusively upon the Koran. As there is no
inquiry into anything new, the precepts have naturally taken a fixed
shape; the rules were long ago established, and they have never been
altered; the student of 1890 receives the information given to the
student of 1490, and no more. But it is this very fact which makes El
Azhar interesting to the looker-on; it is a living relic, a survival in
the nineteenth century of the university of the fourteenth and
fifteenth. It is true that when we think of those great colleges of the
past, the picture which rises in the mind is not one of turbaned, seated
figures in flowing robes; it is rather of aggressively agile youths,
with small braggadocio caps perched on their long locks, their
slender waists outlined in the shortest of jackets, and their long legs
incased in the tightest of party-colored hose. But this is because the
great painters of the past have given immortality to these astonishing
scholars of their own lands by putting them upon their canvases. They
confined themselves to their own lands too, unfortunately for us; they
did not set sail, with their colors and brush