EGYPT, AND SYRIA. 79 
remark. An apartment of great length overlooks the city, the 
river, and the adjacent country ; and feveral beautiful columns 
raife their heads out of the general wreck. In a chamber of 
this building is fabricated the embroidered cloth, which the 
munificence of the Porte annually devotes to the ufe of the 
Kaba. 
Mifr-el-Attike, to the South of the prefent city, is pleafantly 
fituated, and well inhabited. It can now only be efteemed a 
faux-bourg of the former. A mofque there, faid, probably 
without reafon, to have been built by order of the Chalife 
Omar, was lately refcued from the oblivion to which it was 
haftening, by the mandate of Murad Bey. This mofque is a 
building of great extent j there may be thirty or thirty-five 
columns remaining in their original pofition. The reft have 
been reverfed, and again fet up without any regard to order. 
The moft perfe<fl: remain is a fmall odagon building in the 
middle of the mofque, fupported by eight Corinthian columns, 
the fhaft, about ten feet high, of blue-and-white marble. In 
this fmall edifice is a chamber, which is faid never to have been 
opened. Multitudes of columns appear around, to the num- 
ber of more than a hundred, fome in black marble, one has a 
fmall cavity, fabled an impreffion made by the hand of the 
Prophet. The cement is fo hard as to evince that the Saracens 
were no ftrangers to the antient mode of preparing it. Many 
arches of an elliptical form remain, and fome infcriptions, on 
the Weft, probably the place of the antient gate, as it is of the 
modern. 
Antient 
