Next in date to the Taylun Mosque is that of the Sultan al-Hakim, third Caliph of the Fatimites, and founder of the Druze mysteries. The minarets are remarkable in shape, as well as size: they are unprovided with the usual outer gallery, they are based upon a cube of masonry, and they are pierced above with apertures apparently meaningless. A learned Cairene informed me that these spires were devised by the eccentric monarch to disperse, like large censers, fragrant smoke over the city during the hours of prayer. The Azhar and Hasanayn[FN#14] Mosques are simple and artless piles, celebrated for sanctity, but remarkable for nothing save ugliness. Few buildings, however, are statelier in appearance, [p.98]or give a nobler idea of both founder and architect than that which bears Sultan Hasan's name. The stranger stands awe-struck before walls high towering without a single break, a hypaethral court severe in masculine beauty, a gateway that might suit the palace of the Titans, and a lofty minaret of massive grandeur. This Mosque (finished about A.D. 1363), with its fortress aspect, owns no more relationship to the efforts of a later age than does Canterbury Cathedral to an Anglo-Indian "Gothic." For dignified beauty and refined taste, the Mosque and tomb of Kaid Bey and the other Mamluk kings are admirable. Even in their present state, picturesqueness presides over decay, and the traveller has seldom seen aught more striking than the rich light of the stained glass pouring through the first shades of evening upon the marble floor. The modern Mosques must be visited to see Egyptian architecture in its decline and fall. That of Sittna Zaynab (our Lady Zaynab), founded by Murad Bey, the Mamluk, and interrupted by the French invasion, shows, even in its completion, some lingering traces of taste. But nothing can be more offensive than the building which every tourist flogs donkey in his hurry to see-old Mohammed Ali's "Folly" in the citadel. Its Greek architect has toiled to caricature a Mosque to emulate the glories of our English "Oriental Pavilion." Outside, as Monckton Milnes sings, "The shining minarets, thin and high," are so thin, so high above the lumpy domes, that they