Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/150

 children of Allah. Here the outcast finds a stone, at least, on which to lay his head. And the calm flows from the vast domes above him and fills the airy spaces all around. Only now and then it is interrupted by a sigh of ya-Allah, ya-Karim! For though the mosque be in the tinkers' bazaar seldom a sound from the outer world reaches even its court or violates its hallowed silence. And in this vastness of spiritual repose the soul may loaf and invite the body, and the mind may doze and invite the soul. Without cymbals and bells, without organ and choir, without icons and statues, but with the lamps of faith and devotion ever burning, the soul is left to itself to find its way through an infinity of unworldly calm and silence to the divine infinities of the One Supreme—Allah. One day at noon, after a long tramp through the country, I went into the little mosque of a village to rest. I doffed my shoes at the door, realizing then the deep wisdom in the tradition. There are practical as well as spiritual reasons for