and fountains set in their outer walls are blended into harmony by a
film of incense-smoke, and the grease of countless venerating lips and
hands.

[Footnote A: Moslem monastery.]

Featureless walls of mean houses close in again at the next turn; but a
few steps farther another archway reveals another secret scene. This
time it is a corner of the jealously guarded court of ablutions in the
great mosque El Kairouiyin, with the twin green-roofed pavilions that
are so like those of the Alhambra.

Those who have walked around the outer walls of the mosque of the other
Kairouan, and recall the successive doors opening into the forecourt and
into the mosque itself, will be able to guess at the plan of the church
of Fez. The great Almohad sanctuary of Tunisia is singularly free from
parasitic buildings, and may be approached as easily as that of Cordova,
but the approaches of El Kairouiyin are so built up that one never knows
at which turn of the labyrinth one may catch sight of its court of
fountains, or peep down the endless colonnades of which the Arabs say:
"The man who should try to count the columns of Kairouiyin would go
mad."

Marble floors, heavy whitewashed piers, prostrate figures in the
penumbra, rows of yellow slippers outside in the sunlight--out of such
glimpses one must reconstruct a vision of the long vistas of arches, the
blues and golds of the _mirhab_,[A] the lustre of bronze chandeliers,
and the ivory inlaying of the twelfth-century _minbar_[B] of ebony and
sandalwood.