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78 DAYS IN THE SUN
unpleasant surprise. You pull yourself together, mind-
ful of all the praise that tourists have sung of it, mind-
ful of what the Mosque once stood for—and then you
are moved by the idea of actually being in it.
The Mosque is large, but its effect is not magnifi-
cent; it can indeed hardly ever have made an impres-
sion of magnificence. One’s eye roams about in every
direction, but it never encounters a vast space or a
mighty wall, nothing but columns and columns, cutting
off one’s view at no great distance, like tree-trunks in
a dense forest. And as you go on, your eye finds new
series of columns; green columns and blood-red col-
umns, black columns, white columns, red columns and
bright pink columns, columns of jasper and porphyry,
breccia and delicate alabaster—until you finally get
to the walls. In a space not more than six hundred
and fifty feet in length and five hundred feet in width,
you have about a thousand columns. The columns are
not larger than those you would find on the veranda of
a private residence; they are not thicker than the waist
of a boy attending confirmation lessons, and it is not
particularly difficult for you to touch the capitals, from
which arches radiate in red and white masonry, two or
three imposed above each other, in every direction,
from trunk to trunk, like a network of branches.
No doubt every one who enters the Mosque makes
the simile of a forest, and this effect was no doubt in-
tended by the ancient architects. But it is no such
impression as of a path through a beech-wood which
Gothic cathedrals so often give. Here you have only
a young forest whose trees have been cut back so that
their heavy masses of foliage rest directly on a man’s
head.
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