being hidden away in one of the angles of the principal hall. The walls, up to a height of several yards, are decorated with incrustations and mosaics in the most exquisite taste. Higher up, those decorations. which are in jeweller's work are completed by paintings, very sober in colour, but whose admirable drawing do not yield in minute excellence to the finest details of art ornamentation. In a niche on one side there is a sort of collection of all the riches of the building. This niche is not placed haphazard ; it corresponds with the direction of Mecca, and it is from thence that the sheik of the mosque chants the languorous psalmodies of the morning prayer, or drones out the Koran. The sculptured pulpit is placed on the right of this little sanctuary, where there is no altar, but simply a great profusion of lamps and inscriptions. Two enormous chandeliers in copper, ornamented with two wax torches still more enormous, stand as sentinels on either side, and form the sole exterior material of the Mussulman worship.

A few days after this, on one of our working excursions, one of our party made a study in this mosque, which admirably represented its mysterious and poetical character. We had left our asses at

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the door, and had been for the first time obliged to conform to the rule which forbids the traveller to enter a holy place with his shoes upon his feet. Nothing could be more ridiculous than the array of our boots on the steps, each pair looked so thoroughly individual, and so aware of its disgrace. regulation bakshish was handed to the sheik who acted as porter to the mosque, and 'we once more mounted our asses, who, of their own accord, pulled up at the entrance of the mosque El-Barkouk.

The

During our little journey, our escort had largely increased, and the sight of our asses brought out countless mendicants. While we were in the mosque the sight of our coursers had attracted the poor population who burrow among the ruins, and, like flies fluttering about a piece of meat, this multitude of women and children endured the roughest pushes and hustlings of our ass drivers rather than renounce the few copper paras which we flung to them as alms, under the pretext of bakshish. For the two must not be confounded; bakshish is not alms, which it would be humiliating to an Arab to receive. It is a present, a gift between princes who respect and desire to do honour to one another. In the East bakshish is a colossal institution; it is an indirect tax upon the traveller

which may perhaps exceed the whole cost of his journey, if he gives way to temptations towards grandeur in his offerings. The gratitude on the part of the child or the woman who receives the gift consists in demanding more with maddening persistence, in proportion to the generosity which you have exhibited on the first occasion.

The mosque El-Barkouk is more imposing than the first, though of later date. Its principal entrance, surmounted by covered galleries, has the strangest possible effect, and it is prodigally adorned with marble staircases, and porphyry columns. Over this rich ornamentation the taste of a skilful architect has presided, for all this wealth is not the result of a ridiculous heaping together of precious materials and harsh colours, such as we see in the more modern Mussulman constructions. Saint Sophia, with its load of gilding and its huge proportions, does not produce the impression of grand and mysterious poetry which the mosques of Cairo inspire to the highest degree, from the great mosque of Hassan to the smallest of the buildings which decorate the tombs of the Mamelouks, so well do taste and elegance supply the place of the mathematical proportions of a purely massive and rude building. In

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Persia and at Athens I had an opportunity of studying this superiority of art over heaped up matter, a superiority which permits the Parthenon to be much smaller than the Church of the Madeleine, and the great mosque of Ispahan to fit three times over inside that which the Sultan Abdul Aziz is about to consecrate to the memory of his mother, in one of the most important sites in old Stamboul. Non numerantur sed ponderantur, true artists of all ages have said to themselves, in a Latin proverb but little practised by the Romans, who were everywhere bitten with a mania for constructing things more fatally coarse and heavy than anything which had preceded them. Petra afforded us a shocking example of this truth. During our excursion in the Valley of Tombs, our little party, though always frivolous, had made no unbecoming remarks, had said none of those things which would depoetize Homer himself, if that were possible. This abstinence was a mark of discernment; an indication of the profound impression which this city of the olden time had made upon us, and of the sincere admiration with which we had contemplated a spectacle which I shall ever hold to be unsurpassed.

Regretfully we turned our backs on this beautiful

dream, in order to return to the city by the way of the tombs of the Mamelouks. These funereal monuments, whose dimensions are much less, form a suburb to the Valley of the Caliphs, without injuring the character of the fantastic landscape. The background of the superb picture is formed by the mountain of Mokattam, against which these tombs stand, placed closely together, and as picturesque in their own fashion as the mosques which we had just seen. They are sheltered by canopies of sculptured stone and wood, in which I perceived a striking analogy with the constructions which I had had an opportunity of seeing at Erzeroum, and in the neighbourhood of Mossoul. Were these monuments, or only their ornamentation, the work of Persian artists? either may be the case. The roof of these mausoleums is decorated with small domes, which are steeper and more angular than the Arab cupola proper, and which approach the very open arch of the Persian ogive, which forms a true triangle, rounded at its extremities. This is a remark purely of form, and of presumed analogy which does not imply any archeological conclusion more authorised to define its origin.

These elegant tombs are tolerably close together,