Though the exterior of the Great Mosque leaves much to be desired from an architectural point of view, the interior, with its maze of horseshoe arches supported on a forest of marble and porphyry columns, is a very miracle of form and color. At the end of the central nave, orientated, of course, toward Mecca, is the _mihrab_, or sacred niche, flanked by two magnificent columns of variegated marble from Cæsarea in Algeria, which, it is said, one of the Byzantine emperors offered to buy for their weight in gold. The _mihrab_ is lined with glorious old tiles in the “lost shade” of Persian blue, brought from Baghdad by one of the princes of the Aghleb dynasty, who contributed them to the mosque, along with the rare Eastern woods which form the _mimbar_, or pulpit, as an act of penance for having defiled the sacred precincts by a drunken orgy. The endless vistas of columns and arches; the rich, mellow tints of the tiles, woods, and marbles; the soft light which filters in through the colored glass of the windows in the great dome—these combine to produce an effect of beauty, dignity, and solemnity unsurpassed by any religious edifice in the world. Very imposing, with its five great domes, is the Djamaa Amor Abbada, or, as it is better known, the Mosque of the Saber. A purely modern structure, with an interior which has little to recommend it, it takes its name from the enormous saber, as long as a man and almost as heavy, which hangs against the _mimbar_ as a reminder, I suppose, that Islam is a religion of the sword. It is venerated as the work of the founder of the mosque, Amor Abbada, an illiterate blacksmith saint, who, doubtless bored to extinction by the austere life expected of a marabout, amused himself by forging these huge clumsy swords. Another of his efforts took the form of a great pipe, fully five feet in length and painted a vivid green, which, so the attendant gravely informed us, the saint was wont to smoke. When my daughter flippantly remarked that it must have required two strong men to hold it and a five-pound sack of Bull Durham to fill its capacious bowl, the priest replied reprovingly that Amor Abbada was a giant and that such things were trifles to him. Which serves as an illustration of how quickly legends grow in the credulous and superstitious East, for Amor Abbada, far from being a figure of remote antiquity, died only a few years before the outbreak of our Civil War. As a matter of fact, it has never been very difficult to acquire sainthood in Moslem countries; almost any one can do it who has a well-developed sense of the dramatic.