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Nowadays, the Spring of the Sun waters a famous Christian relic, the Virgin's Tree . Located 500m south of the obelisk, this gnarled sycamore-fig is supposedly descended from a tree whose branches shaded the Holy Family during their Egyptian exile. Tradition has it that they rested here between Bilbeis and Babylon-in-Egypt, and Mary washed the clothes of the baby Jesus in the stone trough that still lies beside the tree. Early this century, "Christian souvenir-hunting was so bad that the owner of the sycamore tied a knife to the tree and put up a notice begging people not to hack at it any more with axes, and to leave some of it for others" (Aldridge). Now enclosed within a compound, it grows near the Church of the Virgin , a modern building on the site of far older churches. The spring's Arabic name has attached itself to the Ain Shams quarter, one metro stop beyond Matariyya. Densely populated and solidly working-class, the neighbourhood is regarded by the police as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.
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