Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/147

Rh of the city, the Almohades sent here their most skilled architects, Abd Allah ben Daoud and Abu Imran Musa, who flanked the principal court with marble tablets, polished as mirrors, constructed a beautiful basin for ritual ablutions, and added lovely fountains and a beautiful marble window with fine tracery and an inscription glorifying our Lord Mahomet"

The old manuscript Rawd el-Kirtas describing just this period in the life of the mosque and the medersa, speaks of two hundred seventy pillars forming sixteen aisles with twenty-one arches each, of the space within the mosque for twenty-three thousand of the Faithful, of seventeen doors leading to the interior of the temple and of the pulpit which was made from rare and artistically carved woods and from which prophets, astrologers and wise ulema addressed the people and their rulers. In the sixteenth century, when Leo Africanus visited and described it, the temple was no less splendid. He noted that many of the sciences were taught within the medersa from the hour of sunrise until after midnight, with only short intervals for prayer, and also that the buildings housed an immense library of twenty thousand volumes, of which only seventeen hundred now remain.

As we wandered round it, we peeped into the forbidden enclosure through the gates, through every possible aperture and even over the wall from the terrace of the Meshabia medersa. In this way we beheld the beautiful entrance leading in from the court where the silver stream of the fountain murmurs its continual blessing. The massive parts of this gate were adorned with stucco reliefs of acanthus leaves and arabesques, most ingenious