ubies and sapphires. And the birds, you
may be sure, have their nests also in the house of the holy one.
They are wont indeed to soil the carpets and the mats on which the
worshippers kneel, and their nests are so many blots up there amid the
gildings of the carved cedarwood; but then their song, the symphony that
issues from that aviary, is so sweet to the living who pray and to the
dead who dream. . . .

*****

But yet, when all is said, these mosques seem somehow to be wanting.
They do not wholly satisfy you. The access to them perhaps is too easy,
and one feels too near to the modern quarters of the town, where the
hotels are full of visitors--so that at any moment, it seems, the spell
may be broken by the entry of a batch of Cook's tourists, armed with
the inevitable _Baedeker_. Alas! they are the mosques of Cairo, of
poor Cairo, that is invaded and profaned. The memory turns to those of
Morocco, so jealously guarded, to those of Persia, even to those of Old
Stamboul, where the shroud of Islam envelops you in silence and gently
bows your shoulders as soon as you cross their thresholds.

And yet what pains are being taken to-day to preserve these mosques,
which in olden times were such delightful retreats. Neglected for whole
centuries, never repaired, notwithstanding the veneration of their
heedless worshippers, the greater part of them were fallen into ruin;
the fine woodwork of their interiors had become worm-eaten, their
cupolas were cracked and their mosaics covered the floor as with a hail
of mother-of-pearl, of porphyry and marble. It seemed that to repair
all this was a task incapable of fulfilment; it was sheer folly, people
said, to conceive the idea of it.

Nevertheless, for nearly twenty years now an army of workers has been at
the task, sculptors, marble-cutters, mosaicists. Already certain of
the sanctuaries, the most venerable of them indeed, have been entirely
renovated. After having re-echoed for some years to the sounds of
hammers and chisels, during the course of these vast renovations, they
are restored now to peace and to prayer, and the birds have recommenced
to build their nests in them.

It will be the glory of the present reign that it has preserved, before
it was too late, all this magnificent legacy of Moslem art. When the
city of "The Arabian Nights," which was formerly there, shall have
entirely disappeared, to give place to a vulgar _entrepot_ of commerce
and of pleasure, to which