The time at my disposal being limited, I went at once in search of a guide, who should accompany me to Mecca and thence to Arafat, and put me in the way of performing the rites and mysteries of the Hájj. The men who officiate in that capacity are called moghavems. The pick of them had fallen to the lot of the early-comers who had flocked to Jiddah in great numbers; but with my customary luck, I chanced upon a Persian moghavem, whose knowledge of the ceremonies and the holy places of the Pilgrimage was seasoned with the waggish conceits of a singularly original mind. His sceptical witticisms were the more piquant in that he gloried in the name of Seyyid ’Alí. For the rest, he had travelled far and wide, had sat down and laughed beside the waters of Babylon, had wandered on foot as far to the East as Benares, and had undertaken the Pilgrimage of Mecca half a dozen times. I congratulated him on his globe-trotting habit, whereupon he showed a gleam of white teeth, raising himself on the tips of his toes, and stroked his unkempt beard complacently. Then he aired his knowledge of geography. “Yá-Moulai,” he said with unexpected gravity, “Allah has had me in His keeping, may He be praised! He has revealed to me the innermost secrets of the world, and shown to me the whole creation. I have been everywhere except in Hell, and even that experience will not be withheld from me, I trust, when I come to die. True it is, yá-Moulai, that this life is a riddle; we solve it when we give up the ghost—perhaps. Anyhow, my one desire in this world is to go to Europe that I may see China and study the philosophy of that wonderful land.” I had to avert my head lest he should detect the struggle between amusement and politeness which convulsed every feature of my face.

“Ah,” said he, “your Excellency is fortunate to have met me: the Hájj Season is far advanced: moghavems are scarce: and I am one of the most reasonable of men. If you will burst from the bonds of economics in the matter of salary, you will find in me a pleasant travelling companion and a lettered guide.”

“Will two dollars a day content you?” I asked. The offer was a liberal one, and on the spur of a grateful impulse he clinched the bargain without a moment’s hesitation. This trait of character endeared him to me, and so I treated him on a footing of social equality so long as he was my cicerone.

Now, the day was the sixth day of the moon: a distance of some forty-six miles lay between us and the Holy City: and, furthermore, since the Pilgrims had to leave Mecca on the 8th for the hill of Arafat, it followed that we had not a single moment to lose in making preparations for our journey. With many words Seyyid ’Alí staked his wages that, by hiring asses and riding alone, we could cover the road in eleven hours. “Of course,” said he, “we must run the risk of being attacked by Bedouins who lie in wait for stragglers. Indeed, only two days ago, so the rumour runs in the bazaars, a caravan of forty Persian pilgrims was robbed on leaving Heddah for Mecca: and everybody we meet—depend upon it—will do his utmost to terrify us with blood-curdling stories of Arab lawlessness and violence. However, let us pin our faith not in firearms and bravado, but in our cool heads and our stout hearts. And, in the meanwhile, I will take you to a caravanserai, where we shall find an acquaintance of mine, who is the owner of a drove of the fleetest asses in Hejaz. His name is Nassir, and he owns allegiance to the fighting clan of Harb. From him we will hire three donkeys: one for your Excellency, one for the effects we have with us, and a third for myself. Nassir will accompany us on foot, and be a protector to us in the wilderness. Let us hasten lest his services be engaged.”

After bartering with Nassir, it was settled that I should pay him two dollars for the use of each animal (two-thirds to be paid in advance and one-third on alighting in Mecca), while he himself was to receive, in return for his services, a bakhshísh in proportion to his usefulness on the road.

In appearance he was a typical representative of his race, both in bearing and in dress, as well as in accoutrements and in strength. Tall and lean, he had the appearance of a man that had been baked in an oven: his skin was as brown and as wrinkled as a walnut-shell, his features seemed to leap out of the face, while his eyes declared the nobility of a virile though savage nature. He wore a long yellow shirt, reaching below the knees, with a red cotton belt round the waist, in which was stuck an ugly-looking dagger. Slung crosswise over his back a Bedouin generally carries an old-fashioned flint rifle, having a barrel some two yards in length, with a bow-shaped stock covered all over with small square chips of white shells. For this ungainly weapon Nassir substituted a stout Arab club, which was a fortunate thing for Seyyid ’Alí, perhaps, inasmuch as wordy wars between the two men came to be of hourly occurrence.

About five o’clock in the evening, after having smoked a pipe of peace at a coffee-house in the bazaars, we mounted our asses, Seyyid ’Alí and myself, while the fleet-footed driver, go as hard as we might, kept pace with us, without so much as turning a hair. We rode through the Mecca gate, and then bore off in a north-easterly direction in order that I might have an opportunity of visiting Eve’s Tomb. This excursion, because it took us a little out of our way, was not to the liking of our Harbi warrior, who, in his anxiety to reach Mecca by sunrise, was bent on sparing both his own breath and his beasts of burden. But I, having made up my mind to pay my respects to the resting-place of our common mother, was not to be gainsaid; and I contrived to convict my opponent of churlishness by making a point of reaching my destination within half an hour—that is in less than half the time he had said it would take.

Assuredly, Arabia is the cradle of credulity. In that land of legend the historian catches his breath. He is ill at ease, alternately bewildered and sceptical, as might be expected of a man, who, reaching out for truth, lays hold of a myth at every step. Thus, on gaining admittance to the enclosure, I was amazed to notice the exceeding length of the Tomb, and on measuring the low walls believed to define the outlines of Eve’s body, I found that they were one hundred and seventy-three yards long, and about twelve feet broad. In the centre a low dome is conspicuous; it is said to crown Eve’s navel. “What a monster!” I cried, laughing, “easy lies the head of our common mother.” The guide corrected me, saying, “The Well of Wisdom is mistaken. The tomb was not long enough to contain her blessed head. It is well known that only the trunk and limbs of her lie here.” Rising to my full height, five feet nine in my sandals, I asked him to account for the dwindling in the size of man. “The Fountain of Learning must remember,” he replied, “that Eve, our Mother, fell, and with her fell the stature of the human race.” The explanation found a crack in the armour of my credulity, and so, turning back into the direct road, we resumed our journey, joining a caravan of about thirty pilgrims of mixed nationalities, Egyptians, Syrians, Caucasians, Indians, and Malays.

Instead of refreshing breezes, which would have come as a positive godsend, the wind, blowing from the south-west, spread abroad an abominable vapour, and caused the sand to rise and fall like the bosom of the ocean. Sand-heaps twelve feet high might be scattered at any moment in these whirlwinds; but, fortunately, though our asses often sunk over their fetlocks, we reached in safety the Hill of Gaem (the first stage for caravans), where, according to a local superstition, the Messiah will first appear. A small booth here made ample amends for the scarcity of water, and I could not remember ever having tasted more fragrant and delicious coffee.

Slowly but surely the ground now began to rise, and the sand to grow firmer. A caravan of camels glided stealthily by, bells tinkling, pilgrims reciting the Kurán, and the drivers singing to their camels a deeply melodious song called Hodi, which has on them the effect of a goad, urging them on to a brisk unchanging pace. To this accompaniment a camel will cover a great distance without stopping, the general belief being that the camel gets drunk with the sweet burden of the Hodi song.

Overnight, long after sunset, my Harbi driver himself began to sing aloud in the gathering darkness, asking God to protect him from the goblins of the wilderness, and always in a lugubrious minor key, as if he was going to weep. But ever and anon we heard an original song set to the music of the desert, wild as the wastes, elusive as the winds, as revealing and obscure as the tuneless solitudes from whose heart it would seem to spring—a song that broke through melody, and added its tameless burden to the music of the spheres. On cultured Europeans these untutored outbursts would have an uncanny effect, causing the centuries to roll back to the days of their barbarian ancestry, and awakening within them, perhaps, one of those haunting dream-memories of birth far back in the misty past, of an anterior existence in keeping with the strains of incoherent minstrelsy when men, labouring under the burdens of consciousness, sang as the spirit moved them, knowing nothing of the laws of counterpoint and harmony. Such a song was sung by Seyyid ’Alí as we left Heddah, a song written by a famous Sufí writer—

The surrounding hills caught the intonation in their ragged arms and flung it back into the dim-lit sea of eddying sand, echoing and re-echoing the word “Sorrow!” Then my own Arab driver, carried beyond himself, raised his voice in the self-same song, and soon the whole caravan burst out, crying, “Well done, my mate! bravo, my mate! hurrah, my Sorrow,” the hills repeating the last word. Wagner, the one master who has given us the music of the sea and the stars, of the winds and the streams, and of all the vague yearnings that torment the human heart, would have understood us, would perhaps have played the part of echo on his return to civilisation, would certainly have joined in the chorus of that wild Arabian air attuned to Arabia’s barren though luminous solitudes.

Here, at Heddah, a more than usually serious quarrel arose between Seyyid ’Alí and Nassir on the subject of the national virtues of their respective countries. It would certainly have ended in a free fight, had not I, awaking from a snooze at the uproar, turned to the pugnacious Arab, who had accused the Persian of hypocrisy, and said in a tone of gentle reproof: “Yá Nassir, is it true that a Persian is double-faced?” For the space of a minute he eyed the supercilious Seyyid, deliberating; then he turned to me. “I wish he were only double-faced,” he replied, “for then I should know how to deal with him. But Satan has given him as many as two thousand faces, and it is beyond the power of any one man to see them all in his lifetime.” I pursued the inquiry, saying, “Oh, Nassir, supposing you were asked to describe the Persian character, how would you sum it up?” This time he turned his flashing eyes on me. “Character comes from conscience,” he answered; “but a Persian has none.” My guide spat derisively on the sand, muttering, “Courtesy is unknown to these people;” then he addressed me in his own language, saying: “But, yá-Moulai, there’s truth in what the burnt-father said, the Almighty Mason having put so many constituents into the clay of a Persian that it is very difficult to analyse it. Our countryman has as many coils and colours as a serpent. He is the essence of politeness and native refinement. He is the personification of jealousy and envy. Conceit and hypocrisy are embodied in him, and so also are generosity and amour propre.”

The mere sound of the mellifluous Persian drove Nassir beside himself. Raising his stout Arab club, which the Persians call Hájí Yemút or the Pilgrim Slayer, he vowed that he would teach the guide a lesson in courtesy; and then, suddenly bethinking himself that any act of violence on his part would be sure to affect his pocket in the matter of bakhshísh, he turned a contemptuous back upon his adversary, and said to me, smiling all over his face: “This club of mine has many qualifications. It is useful in urging my ass to mend its pace, it gives me support when I am tired, and shelter from the sun when I am sleepy”—here he stuck it in the sand, and tied at the top a strip of cloth on a crossbar—“it serves as a line on which to dry my washed clothes, as an altar when it is the hour for me to pray, as a leaping-pole when a mountain torrent stems my path; and, may Allah be praised, it is my surest defence against all my enemies, be they men or beasts, and so, when I die, God forbid, I will leave it as an inheritance to my son.”

Midnight saw us again on the way, and, in the course of our ride over the gravelly ground that rose ever higher the nearer we approached the mountains, we overtook a big caravan that was preceded by a couple of heralds, who bore aloft the green banner of the Faith, whereon was inscribed the Muhammadan watchword. “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.” Then came the cavalcade of pilgrims, the rear being brought up by a string of camels, and other beasts of burden, heavily laden with tents and water-skins, or mashks, with kitchen utensils and provisions. Like ourselves, these men were latecomers, but being overburdened they were soon left far in the rear by us, indeed they could not hope to reach Mecca before noon on the following day, whereas we were bent on sighting the Holy City ere the rising of the sun.

At the last resting-house, I struck up acquaintance with a Persian pilgrim, seated on a coarse mat; he declared the Arabs to be cowards, while I defied him to justify this charge. “What!” he cried, “anything will frighten them; they are so superstitious. For instance, if a rabbit spring up at their feet and run away from them they will pursue it until it is lost to sight. But if the rabbit comes towards them, they will lose heart, turn on their heels and scuttle as fast as they can lay their legs to the ground, the timid creature in hot pursuit at their heels. However, I will admit that they hold fast together, that they are staunch and true to one another, that they will sacrifice their lives to protect their comrades against the strangers at their gates.” He then began to scratch himself vigorously, giving voice the while to an impromptu verse. Said he; “From sunset to early dawn there’s a merry-making in the kingdom of my body. The mosquitoes are the flutists, the fleas the dancers, and I’m the harpist”—that is, the scratcher, the same word being used in Persian. I left the quaint fellow playing the accompaniment to the dance of the frolicsome fleas and humming mosquitoes, and rode on my way, singing. The ground rose higher and higher. On passing Mount Shíní the road takes a north-easterly direction, and leads to the tomb of Sheykh Mahmud, a priest who is held in special veneration by the Arabs, though the dilapidated state of his grave would scarcely confirm this attitude towards him. And then, at last, on pursuing the way a little further, the minarets of the City of God rise, with the sun, before the pilgrim’s eyes. “Oh, would that I, having beheld its domes, might fall and die,” is now the true Muslim’s devoutest wish.