The founders of mosques generally, but not always, intend them for their own burial places. What is left of Ahmed I., and I fancy there isn’t much left now, is laid away, not in the mosque itself, but in a tomb close at hand, and forming a sort of adjunct to the grand building.
We had to take off our shoes on entering it, just as we did on entering the mosque, and all the other mosques; we brought along our slippers to wear in these excursions, and our guide walking ahead with six pairs under his arm, might have been easily taken for a second-hand dealer in foot gear. The Judge, the heavy man of the party, had wet his feet a little, and as his boots were very tight, he had hard work to doff and don them at each halting place.
He sat on the pavement in front of a mosque, while the guide undertook to remove the refractory boots. They stuck faster at each change, and toward the last it became necessary to hold him, or have him sit astride a post during the operation. Otherwise the guide pulled him all around the yard as a country doctor does a patient when extracting an obstinate tooth.
We feared it would be necessary for all of us to sit on him, or { 160}pile stones on him while the guide pulled, but happily this did not become necessary.
The oft-repeated dragging around on the rough ground was detrimental to the trowsers of the Judge, and he was obliged to have them half-soled before he again wore them.
When we were at the tomb of Ahmed, which contained a sarcophagus, covered with magnificent and costly shawls, and was surmounted with the turban of the defunct Sultan, our sceptical comrade, the “Doubter,” expressed a suspicion that the ruins of Ahmed were not in the box.
“These people are all liars,” said he, “and I don’t believe there ever was such a man.”
We tried to convince him that it was all right, and as he had paid for entering, he was at liberty to believe what he pleased.
“Tell the man to open the place up,” said the “Doubter” to our guide, “and let us see what there is inside.”
The guide tried to inform him, that such a proceeding would be contrary to custom, but the “Doubter” was obstinate and determined to have things his own way.
“I am bound to find out for myself,” he continued, and suiting the action to the word, he endeavored to lift one of the shawls that covered the sarcophagus.