undertaken about 760 for the Abbasside Caliph Mansur, and of Wakidi, written about 820, which is important as containing the text of many treaties made by Mahomet with various tribes. Al-Tabari, too, included the life of Mahomet in his extensive history of Arabia, but his work serves only as a check, consisting, as it does, mainly of extracts from Wakidi. By far the more valuable is the Kuran and the Sunna of tradition. But even these are fragmentary and confused, bearing upon them the ineradicable stamp of alien writers and much second-hand thought.

In the dim, pregnant dawn of religions, by the transfusing power of a great idea, seized upon and made living by a single personality, the world of imagination mingles with the world of fact as we perceive it. The real is felt to be merely the frail shell of forces more powerful and permanent. Legend and myth crowd in upon actual life as imperfect vehicles for the compelling demand made by that new idea for expression. Moreover, personality, that subtle essence, exercises a kind of centripetal force, attracting not only the devotion but the imaginations of those who come within its influence.

Mahomet, together with all the men of action in history, possessed an energy of will so vast as to bring forth the creative faculties of his adherents, and the legends that cluster round him have a special significance as the measure of his personality and influence. The story, for instance, of his midnight journey into the seven heavens is the symbol of an intense spiritual experience that, following the mental temper of the age in which he lived, had to be translated into the concrete. All the affirmations as to his intercourse with Djinn, his inspiration by the angel Gabriel, are inherent factors in the manifestation of his ceaseless mental activity. His marvellous birth and the myths of his childhood are the sum of his followers' devotion, and reveal their reverence translated into terms of the imagination. Character was the mysterious force that his co-religionists tried unconsciously to portray in all those legends relative to his life at Medina, his ruthlessness and cruelty finding a place no less than his humility, and steadfastness under discouragement.

But beneath the weight of the marvellous the real man is almost buried. He has stood for so long with the mists of obscure imaginings about him that his true lineaments are almost impossible to reproduce. The Western world has alternated between the conception of him as a devil, almost Antichrist himself, and a negligible impostor whose power is transient. It has seldom troubled to look for the human energy that wrought out his successes, the faith that upheld them, and the enthusiasm that burned in the Prophet himself with a sombre flame, lighting his followers to prayer and conquest.

And indeed it is difficult, if not impossible, to re-create effectively the world in which he lived. It is so remote from the seas of the world's progression, an eddy in the tide of belief which loses itself in the larger surging, that it makes no appeal of familiarity. But that a study of the period and Mahomet's own personality operating no less through his deeds, faith, and institutions than in the one doubtfully reliable record of his teachings, will result in the perception of the Prophet of Islam as a man among men, has been the central belief during the writing of this biography. Mahomet's personality is revealed in his dealing with his fellows, in the belief and ritual that he imposed upon Arabia, in the mighty achievement of a political unity and military discipline, and therein he shows himself inexorable, cruel, passionate, treacherous, bad, subject to depression and overwhelming doubt, but never weak or purposeless, continually the master of his circumstances, whom no emergency found unprepared, whose confidence in himself nothing could shake, and who by virtue of enthusiasm and resistless activity wrested his triumphs from the hands of his enemies, and bequeathed to his followers his own unconquerable faith and the means wherewith they might attain wealth and sovereignty.

CHAPTER I

MAHOMET'S BIRTHPLACE

"And how many cities were mightier in strength than thy city that hath cast thee forth?"—The Kuran.

In Arabia nature cannot be ignored. Pastures and cornland, mountain slopes and quiet rivers may be admired, even reverenced; but they are things external to the gaze, and make no insistent demand upon the spirit for penetration of their mystery. Arabia, and Mecca as typical of Arabia, is a country governed by earth's primal forces. It has not yet emerged from the shadow of that early world, bare and chaotic, where a blinding sun pours down upon dusty mountain ridges, and nothing is temperate or subdued. It fosters a race of men, whose gods are relentless and inscrutable, revealing themselves seldom, and dwelling in a fierce splendour beyond earthly knowledge. To the spirit of a seeker for truth with senses alert to the outer world, this country speaks of boundless force, and impels into activity under the spur of conviction; by its very desolation it sets its ineradicable mark upon the creed built up within it.

Mahomet spent forty years in the city of Mecca, watching its temple services with his grandfather, taking part in its mercantile life, learning something of Christian and Jewish doctrine through the varied multitudes that thronged its public places. In the desert beyond the city boundaries he wandered, searching for inspiration, waiting dumbly in the darkness until the angel Gabriel descended with rush of wings through the brightness of heaven, commanding:

"Cry aloud, in the name of the Lord who created thee. O, thou enwrapped in thy mantle, arise and warn!"

Mecca lies in a stony valley midway between Yemen, "the Blessed," and Syria, in the midst of the western coast-chain of Arabia, which slopes gradually towards the Red Sea. The height of Abu Kobeis overlooks the eastern quarter of the town, whence hills of granite stretch to the holy places, Mina and Arafat, enclosed by the ramparts of the Jebel Kora range. Beyond these mountains to the south lies Taif, with its glory of gardens and fruit-trees. But the luxuriance of Taif finds no counterpart on the western side. Mecca is barren and treeless; its sandy stretches only broken here and there by low hills of quartz or gneiss, scrub-covered and dusty. The sun beats upon the shelterless town until it becomes a great cauldron within its amphitheatre of hills. During the Greater Pilgrimage the cauldron seethes with heat and humanity, and surges over into Mina and Arafat. In the daytime Mecca is limitless heat and noise, but under the stars it has all the magic of a dream-city in a country of wide horizons.

The shadow of its ancient prosperity, when it was the centre of the caravan trade from Yemen to Syria, still hung about it in the years immediately before the birth of Mahomet, and the legends concerning the founding of the city lingered in the native mind. Hagar, in her terrible journey through the desert, reached Mecca and laid her son in the midst of the valley to go on the hopeless quest for water. The child kicked the ground in torment, and God was merciful, so that from his heel marks arose a spring of clear water—the well Zemzem, hallowed ever after by Meccans. 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.

Such are the legends surrounding the foundation of Mecca and of the Kaaba, of which, as of the legends concerning