This is a square lake,
a month's journey in circuit, its water whiter than milk or silver
and more fragrant than to be comparable to any thing known by
mortals. As many cups are set around it as there are stars in the
firmament; and whoever drinks from it will never thirst more. Then
comes paradise, an ecstatic dream of pleasure, filled with
sparkling streams, honeyed fountains, shady groves, precious
stones, all flowers and fruits, blooming youths, circulating
goblets, black eyed houris, incense, brilliant birds, delightsome
music, unbroken peace.21 A Sheeah tradition makes the prophet
promise to Ali twelve palaces in paradise, built of gold and
silver bricks laid in a cement of musk and amber. The pebbles
around them are diamonds and rubies, the earth saffron, its
hillocks camphor. Rivers of honey, wine, milk, and water flow
through the court of each palace, their banks adorned with various
resplendent trees, interspersed with bowers consisting each of one
hollow transparent pearl. In each of these bowers is an emerald
throne, with a houri upon it arrayed in seventy green robes and
seventy yellow robes of so fine a texture, and she herself so
transparent, that the marrow of her ankle, notwithstanding robes,
flesh, and bone, is as distinctly visible as a flame in a glass
vessel. Each houri has seventy locks of hair, every one under the
care of a maid, who perfumes it with a censer which God has made
to smoke with incense without the presence of fire; and no mortal
has ever breathed such fragrance as is there exhaled. 22

20 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. x. p. 206.

21 Koran, ch. lv. ch. lvi.

22 Hyat ul Kuloob, ch. xvi. p. 286.

Such a doctrine of the future life as that here set forth, it is
plain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on the
minds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate races
of the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moral
conviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of a
score of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set off
with the arbitrary drapery of a poetic fancy, colored by the
peculiar idiosyncrasies of Mohammed, emphasized to suit his
special ends, and all inflamed with a vindictive and propagandist
animus. Any word further in explanation of the origin, or in
refutation of the soundness, of this system of belief once so
imminently aggressive and still so widely established would seem
to be superfluous.

CHAPTER XII.

EXPLAN