Their fingers slipped over the
beads of the chaplets they wore round their necks, and Domini thought
of her rosary. Some prayed alone, removed in shady corners, with faces
turned to the wall. Others were gathered into knots. But each one
pursued his own devotions, immersed in a strange, interior solitude to
which surely penetrated an unseen ray of sacred light. There were young
boys praying, and old, wrinkled men, eagles of the desert, with fierce
eyes that did not soften as they cried the greatness of Allah, the
greatness of his Prophet, but gleamed as if their belief were a thing
of flame and bronze. The boys sometimes glanced at each other while they
prayed, and after each glance they swayed with greater violence, and
bowed down with more passionate abasement. The vision of prayer had
stirred them to a young longing for excess. The spirit of emulation
flickered through them and turned their worship into war.
In a second and smaller court before the portal of the mosque men
were learning the Koran. Dressed in white they sat in circles, holding
squares of some material that looked like cardboard covered with minute
Arab characters, pretty, symmetrical curves and lines, dots and dashes.
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