The “Garden” is the most elaborate part of the Mosque.  Little can be said in its praise by day, when it bears the same relation to a second-rate church in Rome as an English chapel-of-ease to Westminster Abbey.  It is a space of about eighty feet in length, tawdrily decorated so as to resemble a garden.  The carpets are flowered, and the pediments of the columns are cased with bright green tiles, and adorned to the height of a man with gaudy and unnatural vegetation in arabesque.  It is disfigured by handsome branched candelabras of cut crystal, the work, I believe, of a London house, and presented to the shrine by the late Abbas Pasha of Egypt.[FN#24]

The only admirable feature of the view is the light

[p.313] cast by the windows of stained glass[FN#25] in the Southern wall.  Its peculiar background, the railing of the tomb, a splendid filigree-work of green and polished brass, gilt or made to resemble gold, looks more picturesque near than at a distance, when it suggests the idea of a gigantic bird-cage.  But at night the eye, dazzled by oil-lamps[FN#26] suspended from the roof, by huge wax candles, and by smaller illuminations falling upon crowds of visitors in handsome attire, with the richest and the noblest of the city sitting in congregation when service is performed,[FN#27] becomes less critical.  Still the scene must be viewed with Moslem bias, and until a man is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the East, the last place the Rauzah will remind him of, is that which the architect primarily intended it to resemble-a garden.

Then with Hamid, professionally solemn, I reassumed the position of prayer, and retraced my steps.  After passing through another small door in the dwarf wall that bounds the Muwajihah, we did not turn to the right, which would have led us to the Bab al-Salam; our course was in an opposite direction, towards the Eastern wall of the temple.  Meanwhile we repeated, “Verily Allah and His Angels[FN#28] bless the Apostle!  O ye who believe, bless him,

[p.314] and salute Him with Honour!” At the end of this prayer, we arrived at the Mausoleum, which requires some description before the reader can understand the nature of our proceedings there.

The Hujrah[FN#29] or “Chamber” as it is called, from the circumstance of its having been Ayishah’s room, is an irregular square of from fifty to fifty-five feet in the South-East corner of the building, and separated on all sides from the walls of the Mosque by a passage about twenty-six feet broad on the South side, and twenty on the East.  The reason of this isolation has been before explained, and there is a saying of Mohammed’s, “O Allah, cause not my Tomb to become an Object of Idolatrous Adoration!  May Allah’s Wrath fall heavy upon the People who make the Tombs of their Prophets Places of Prayer[FN#30]!”