respectfully from a house-top at the tiled dome which covers the tomb of the Imâm Abu Ḥanîfah. He was the founder of the earliest of the four orthodox sects of the Sunnis and he aided Manṣûr in the building of Baghdâd. Even in Ibn Jubeir’s time the city had retreated from the shrine and he describes it as lying far outside the walls, as it does to-day. We then crossed the Tigris by an upper bridge of boats and visited the Kâẓimein. Here too a village has sprung up round the sanctuary which shelters the remains of the seventh and ninth Shî’ah Imâms.[93] The place is now purely a Shî’ah shrine, though its original sanctity was due to the fact that somewhere in this region stood the tomb of Ibn Ḥanbal, the founder of the last of the four orthodox Sunni sects. His tomb still existed when Ibn Baṭûṭaḥ visited Baghdâd in 1327, but it fell subsequently into ruin and has now disappeared. No infidel is permitted to enter a Shî’ah mosque, and it is well not to linger with too great a show of interest at the gates, so as to avoid the ignominy, which you are helpless to avert, of being hustled out of the way by a fanatical crowd. I went therefore to a neighbouring building, the tomb of Sir Iḳbâl ed Dauleh, brother to the king of Oudh, and begged the wakîl to allow me to look upon the Kâẓimein from his roof. The wakîl, the guardian of Sir Iḳbâl’s tomb, was a charming and cheerful mullah, dressed in long robes and a white turban. He turned a friendly eye upon me, partly out of the innate sociability of his character, and partly in view of the fact that I was a fellow subject of his departed master. Not only did he grant my request, but he presented me with a bunch of pomegranate flowers and entertained me with coffee and sherbet. “Why,” said he, “do you travel so far?” I replied that I had a great curiosity to see the world and all that lay therein. “You are right,” he answered. “Man has but a short while to live, and to see everything is a natural desire. But few have time to accomplish it--what would you? we are but human.” And he drew his robe round him and sipped contentedly at the sherbet, repeating as he did so his elegy on the race: “Insân! we are human.” With that he turned his attention to the things of this brief world and gave me his opinion of a high official of the empire. “He is mad,” he declared, “majnûn.” “He is a man of books rather than of deeds,” said I, for I knew the official in question and held him in respect. “That is what I call majnûn,” replied the mullah sharply.