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Upon the base the Kaaba rose, an oblong cube forty feet tall, eighteen paces lengthwise, and fourteen in breadth, shrouded all in black silk wholly unrelieved, except by one broad band of the appearance of gold, and inscriptions from the Koran, of a like appearance, wrought in boldest lettering.
The removal of the old kesoua was performed in a very indecorous manner; and a contest ensued among the hadjys and people of Mekka, both young and old, about a few rags of it. The hadjys even collect the dust which sticks to the walls of the Kaaba, under the kesoua, and sell it, on their return, as a sacred relic.
After a long journey across barren and solitary deserts, on his entering the illuminated temple, he was so much struck with its appearance, and overawed by the black Kaaba, that he fell prostrate close by the place where I was sitting, and remained long in that posture of adoration.
At the time of the Deluge the Kaaba was buried in mud, and for centuries afterward it was overgrown with trees. When Hagar and her son Ishmael were driven out from the household of Abraham, they wandered by chance to this very spot, desolate and forsaken.
There have been solemn and wordy disputes by theologians as to whether he made the journey in the flesh, or whether his spirit alone crossed the dread portals dividing our night from the celestial day. He was lying in the Kaaba, so runs the legend, when the Angel of the Lord appeared to him, and after having purged his heart of all sin, carried him to the Temple at Jerusalem.
He built a vast temple within its walls, and purposed to make Sana the pilgrim-city for all Arabia. But the old custom still clove to Mecca, and finding he could in nowise coerce the people into forsaking the Kaaba, he determined to invade Mecca itself and to destroy the rival place of worship.
The pavement of the interior is deeply worn by the knees of the Moslem pilgrims, who compassed it seven times, kneeling, as they now do in the Kaaba, at Mecca. The sides are embroidered with sentences from the Koran, in Cufic characters, and the roof is in the form of a fluted shell, of a single piece of pure white marble, fifteen feet in diameter.
The benefactors to the Kaaba have enriched the temple of Mekka, and the idle persons employed in it; but no one has thought of forming any establishment for facilitating the pilgrimage of the poor negroes and Indians, or of procuring for them a free passage across the gulf to the Hedjaz; the expense of which, amounting to a dollar or two, is that which they feel most heavily.
A scion of the family of Hashem and of the tribe of Koreish, the noblest race in Arabia, and the guardians of the ancient temple and idols of the Kaaba, Mahomet was born at Mecca, August 20, A.D. 570.
That the Muslim belief possesses institutions such as the reverence for the Kaaba, the rite of Pilgrimage, the acceptance of Mecca as its sacred city, is due to its founder's love of his native place, and the ceremonial of which his own creed was really the inseparable outcome. Besides his recognition of the need of ritual, he was fully aware of the repugnance of most men to the wholly new.
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