INTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF THE METWALYS. 
On entering many of the mosques of Cairo, and particularly that of the Metwalys, 
the traveller observes the elegance and lightness of character which prevail in their 
construction, and the effect produced by the springing of the arches from the columns. 
That most striking change in architecture, which appears to have commenced in 
Byzantium, became Arabic or Saracenic in the East, and, as it advanced to the 
West, became the Gothic of later period. Its origin in Byzantium may be traced 
to the remains of those Graeco-Roman edifices which the Arabs adapted to their 
religious structures, as we now see them. Columns of various heights, the materials 
and relics of earlier Roman temples, were everywhere pressed into a new service and 
for another worship, and their remains became part of the Basilica, the Mosque, or 
the Cathedral. 
Those who have visited Rome will be reminded, on seeing this view of the interior 
of the Mosque of the Metwalys, of St. John Lateran, Sta. Maria Maggiore, and other 
churches, constructed with similar materials furnished by the ruins of ancient Rome. 
Marble columns of every variety, and capitals of various forms and dimensions offered 
to the Arab architects the ready means of supporting the roofs of their religious 
buildings. Spain, which they conquered, furnishes similar examples: the great mosque 
of Cordova contains above eight hundred columns, which were removed not only from 
Roman temples in Spain but from the ruins of Carthage, and transported thence by 
the Moors as a readier means of obtaining them than by quarrying the columns from 
the rocks. Wherever the Moslems raised the temples, the principles of construction 
common with the Byzantines were observed,—columns supporting arches, generally 
pointed, but often with more than half the cix’cle forming the arch; sometimes with 
many lobes, but all partaking of that peculiar chai’acter so commonly observed in 
the Moorish remains in Spain and of the Arabs in Egypt, and distinguished by us as 
the Saracenic. When those were adopted in Christian countries, order grew out of 
the earliest and rudest arrangements; until at length our Norman and English Gothic, 
thus springing from the ruins of the Lower Empire, became established by laws of 
structure, as certain as the principles which governed the construction of the temples 
of the Greeks. 
The Arabs who were forbidden by Mahomed, as the Jews had been by Moses, to 
make any image which bore resemblance to any living thing, sought by beautiful lines 
and forms and colours to decorate their temples: whence, in the extraordinary fertility 
of their invention, their architecture has been enriched with a redundancy of those 
forms and colours of infinite variety and beauty, and become what we understand by 
the term — Arabesque. 
A covering from the fervid sun, a fountain whereat to make the ablutions commanded 
