A mist lay over the city as I stood in a narrow byway, and gazed up at a heavy lattice, of which the decayed and blackened wood seemed on guard before some tragic or weary secret. Before me was the entrance to the mosque of Ibn-Tulun, older than any mosque in Cairo save only the mosque of Amru. It is approached by a flight of steps, on each side of which stand old, impenetrable houses. Above my head, strung across from one house to the other, were many little red and yellow flags ornamented with gold lozenges. These were to bear witness that in a couple of days’ time, from the great open place beneath the citadel of Cairo, the Sacred Carpet was to set out on its long journey to Mecca. My guide struck on a door and uttered a fierce cry. A small shutter in the blackened lattice was opened, and a young girl, with kohl-tinted eyelids, and a brilliant yellow handkerchief tied over her coarse, black hair, leaned out, held a short parley, and vanished, drawing the shutter to behind her. The mist crept up about the tawdry flags, a heavy door creaked, whined on its hinges, and from the house of the girl there came an old, fat man bearing a mighty key. In a moment I was free of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. I ascended the steps, passed through a doorway, and found myself on a piece of waste ground, flanked on the right by an old, mysterious wall, and on the left by the long wall of the mosque, from which close to me rose a gray, unornamented minaret, full of the plain dignity of unpretending age. Upon its summit was perched a large and weary-looking bird with draggled feathers, which remained so still that it seemed to be a sad ornament set there above the city, and watching it forever with eyes that could not see. At right angles, touching the mosque, was such a house as one can see only in the East--fantastically old, fantastically decayed, bleared, discolored, filthy, melancholy, showing hideous windows like windows in the slum of a town set above coal-pits in a colliery district, a degraded house, and yet a house which roused the imagination and drove it to its work. In this building once dwelt the High Priest of the mosque. This dwelling, the ancient wall, the gray minaret with its motionless bird, the lamentable waste ground at my feet, prepared me rightly to appreciate the bit of old Cairo I had come to see.