are correspondingly
distorted."--_McLellan, Psychology._

Upon the evening of the following day, Amzi and Yusuf set out in quest
of Mohammed, to whom the manuscript had not yet been given. Stopping at
the house of Cadijah, a stone building having some pretensions to
grandeur, they learned that Mohammed had left the city. Accordingly,
thinking he would probably be found in the Cave of Hira, they took a
by-path towards the mountains.

The sun was hot, but a pleasant breeze blew from the plains towards the
Nejd, and, from the elevation which they now ascended, Yusuf noted with
interest a scene every point of which was entirely different from that
of his Persian home--different perhaps from that of any other spot on
the face of the earth; a scene desolate, wild, and barren, yet destined
to be the cradle of a mighty movement that was ere long to agitate the
entire peninsula of Arabia, and eventually to exercise its baneful
influence over a great part of the Eastern Hemisphere.[7]

Below him lay the long, narrow, sandy valley. No friendly group of palms
arose to break its dreary monotony; no green thing, save a few parched
aloes, was there to form a pleasant resting-place for the eye. The
passes below, those ever-populous roads leading to the Nejd, Syria,
Jeddah, and Arabia-Felix, were crowded with people; yet, even their
presence did not suffice to remove the air of deadness from the scene.
Of one thing only could the beholder be really conscious--desolation,
desolation; a desolate city surrounded by huge, bare, skeleton-like
mountains, grim old Abu Kubays with the city stretching half way up its
gloomy side, on the east; the Red mountain on the west; Jebel Kara
toward Tayf, and Jebel Thaur with Jebel Jiyad the Greater, on the south.

[Illustration: "Read, O Mohammed, and see him who was able to restore
the withered hand."--See page 23.]

Yusuf watched the people, many of whom were pilgrims, swarming like so
many ants below him towards the Caaba, which was in full view, standing
like a huge sarcophagus in the center of the great courtyard. In the
transparent air of the Orient, even the pillars supporting the covered
portico about the courtyard were quite visible. Yusuf had observed the
great system of barter, the buying and selling that went on beneath the
roof of that long portico, within the very precincts of the temple set
apart for the worship of the Deity, and, as he watched the pigmy
creatures, now swarming