In the Shrine
because he knew our host and wished to do us honour.
" You belong to the House," he told him. " I myself will
take you round/'
And so, as we stood on the step before the heavy curtain,
he called the blessing upon us—of 'Ali and Muhammad and
the two Imams of their family—in a voice so beautiful,
chanting its invocation in the night air for us who were
about to enter the sanctuary, that I have rarely heard any-
thing more impressive or more appealing. " Allah is
great,** he said, and motioned us to enter.
We first came into a gallery roofed with stalactite work
of mirrors, glittering dimly, and with mirrors let into
cheap and bad woodwork round the sides: and then coming
to another curtain between very tall double doors of beaten
silver, with thin models of the hand of 'Abbas cut out in
silver sheets and nailed across the design here and there—
we stepped into the inner sanctuary of the tomb.
It was a very high room with the two great silver door-
ways at right angles to each other. Glass chandeliers in
numbers hung from the ceiling. The walls were adorned
with arabesques in colours on a dark ground. On the
floor were carpets poor in quality. All this was but the
setting for the tomb.
It stood in the middle within its triple cage, whose outer
silver more than half-way up is constantly polished by the