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The most magnificent of these took place on the 23d of April, the anniversary of Mahomet's death. On the eve of this feast we enjoyed a fairy-like spectacle. The tops of all the minarets were illuminated with hundreds of little lamps; and as there are a great many of these slender spires, it can be readily imagined that this sea of light must have a beautiful effect.
And when you think of the leagues of blighted, blasted, sandy, rocky, sun-burnt, ugly, dreary, infamous country you have ridden over to get here, you think it is the most beautiful, beautiful picture that ever human eyes rested upon in all the broad universe! If I were to go to Damascus again, I would camp on Mahomet's hill about a week, and then go away. There is no need to go inside the walls.
This and all allied legends are fruit of a desire to magnify the divine authority of Mahomet's mission by dwelling on the intervention of a higher power in the disposal of his fate. Of Abd al Muttalib's ten sons, Abdallah was the most handsome in form and stature, so that the fame of his beauty spread into the harems of the city, and many women coveted him in their hearts.
This period of his life he always rather accounted, as the Arabs do the idolatrous times before Mahomet's advent, the "period of darkness." On the commercial side the Athenaeum still lacked success; nor was like to find it under the highly uncommercial management it had now got into. This, by and by, began to be a serious consideration.
Abu Sofian having come out of the town in the evening to reconnoitre, he fell in with Al Abbas, who, out of friendship to his countrymen, had ridden from the army with the hope of meeting some straggling Meccans whom he might send back with the news of Mahomet's approach, and advise the Meccans to surrender.
In every natural manifestation that struck Mahomet's imagination in these early days, God appeared to him as the sovereign of power, as terrible and as remote as He was in the lightnings on Sinai. What wonder, then, that when the call came to him to take up his mission it became a command to "arise and warn"?
In sorrow Abu Lubaba went into the camp of the Koreitza, and when they questioned him he told them openly that they must abandon hope. Their doom was decreed by the Prophet, sanctioned by Allah; it was irrevocable. When the Koreitza heard the sentence they bowed their heads, some in wrath, some in despair, and charged Abu Lubaba with supplications for Mahomet's clemency.
Mahomet's first flush of inspiration, which waned before the heaviness of his later tasks, is the cumulation of that wild and fervid art with the breath of the desert urgent within it.
Backwards and forwards along this beautiful paseo we went, the moon lending her enchantment, and the different bands filling the air with ravishing strains, odorous plants of the tropics lading it with perfumes, and the dark-eyed Señoras reclining in their luxurious calesas, gave as good an idea of a paradise of Mahomet's order as one could wish.
'Socially and politically, proceeds the passage, 'the Saracen empire was little better than the Gothic, Hunnish, and Avar monarchies; and that it proved more durable, with almost equal oppression, is to be attributed to the powerful enthusiasm of Mahomet's religion, which tempered for some time its avarice and tyranny. The same sentiment is repeated still more emphatically at p. 468 The political policy of the Saracens was of itself utterly barbarous; and it only caught a passing gleam of justice from the religious feeling of their prophet's doctrines.
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