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Updated: May 2, 2025
The press of pilgrims around the northeastern corner of the Kaaba, to which the guide would have conducted the Prince next, was greater than at the well. Each was waiting his turn to kiss the Black Stone before beginning the seven circuits of the House. Never had the new-comer seen a concourse so wrought upon by fanaticism; never had he seen a concourse so peculiarly constituted.
When he came to the Kaaba, he kissed the corner of the black stone, went seven times round three times in a trot, four times walking then went to the station of Abraham, and coming again to the black stone, reverently kissed it.
He was about to tell Abdur Kad'r that they must now regain their camels and hasten to the oasis while there was sufficient light to examine the excavations, when the sheikh suddenly pulled him down, for Dick had stood upright on a boulder to obtain an uninterrupted field of vision. "Look!" he growled. "Four of them! And, by the Holy Kaaba, they mean mischief!"
Nuremberg had been witnessing this sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of this biennial pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very ends of the earth to worship their prophet in his own Kaaba in his own Mecca.
When the Kureisch heard of it, they set out in a body to the seashore and took away the wood of the ship to build a roof for the Kaaba. It is a significant fact that tradition puts a Greek carpenter in Mecca who was able to advise them as to the construction. The Meccans themselves were not sufficiently skilled in the art of building. But now a great difficulty awaited them.
It was a perilous moment; and when Burton looked at the windowless walls and at the officials at the door, and thought of the serried mass of excited fanatics outside, he felt like a trapped rat. However safe a Christian might have been at Mecca, nothing could have preserved him from the ready knives of the faithful if detected in the Kaaba. The very idea was pollution to a Moslem.
In this desolate place part of the Amalekites and tribes from Yemen settled; the child Ishmael grew up amongst them and founded his race by marrying a daughter of the chief. Abraham visited him, and under his guidance the native temple of the Kaaba was built and dedicated to the true God, but afterwards desecrated by the worship of idols within it.
When I told him I had not heard the sermon, nor seen the preacher or his camel, he demanded why, and what else was there to do, O Prince? I related how we had been pursued by the terrible Yellow Air; how it had overtaken me; how I fell down dying at the corner of the Kaaba, and by whom I was saved even as the life was departing. This last directed him to you.
This ceremony is to be repeated seven times; the three first are in a quick pace, in imitation of the Prophet, whose enemies having reported that he was dangerously ill, he contradicted them by running thrice round the Kaaba at full speed.
"That they are beggars is nothing," he said. "Allah is good to all his creatures. The jackals are his, and must be fed. For this perhaps the unfortunates were blown here by the angel that rides the yellow air. Four corpses were landed, and their clothes sold in the camp." "Thou wouldst say," the Prince rejoined, "that the plague will go with us to the Kaaba. Content thee, Shaykh.
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