Chapter 10

MOHAMMED'S ENTRANCE INTO MEDINA.

"Oh, it is excellent To have a giant's strength: but it is tyrannous To use it like a giant."

--_Shakespeare._

Once more after the lapse of years let us look at Amzi as he sat one morning in his house at Medina.

The cool and pleasant atmosphere of the town in contrast with the burning, breathless heat of Mecca had charmed him. He had immediately purchased a house and furnished it with the luxurious splendor which suited his rather voluptuous taste.

The apartment in which he sat was in the middle story, the one sacred to the men in a house of Medina. Rich Persian carpets were on the floor, rugs of Inde were scattered about and piled with cushions filled with softest down. Low divans invited repose, and heavy curtains of yellow silk shut out the too bright glare of day. The ceiling, after the Persian fashion, was inlaid with mirrors, fitted in in different patterns, and divided by carved sticks of palm, stained red; and the sweet odor of richest perfumes of Arabia-Felix spread through the room as if emanating from the silken hangings of the wall.

The window was open, and the breeze from the east, bearing, as it were, tales of the Nejd, the land of brave men and beautiful women, swayed the curtains softly. Outside, in the sloping garden, waved the graceful branches of the tamarisk, glittering with dew in the early morning sun; and near the window a jujube tree stretched its dark, shining leaves and yellow fruit temptingly near. Acacias with sweet-scented yellow blossoms, oleanders glowing with rosy bloom, and a thicket of silver-leaved castors separated the little plot from the gardens below, where grew gourds and cucumbers, lime and fig trees, grape-vines, water-melons and pomegranates; and beyond that lay a bright patch of Bursim, or Egyptian clover, like a yellow-green island on a darker sea.

Amzi, comfortably habited in a jubbeh of pink silk, worn over a caftan of fine white silk flowered with green and confined by a fringed, yellow sash at the waist, reclined in a position of luxurious ease at the window. Between his plump fingers he held the amber stem of a handsomely carved pipe. He looked scarcely older than when on that memorable journey in which he first met Yusuf. His eye was still as bright, his hair scarcely more gray, and his cheek as ruddy as then; yet there was a somewhat discontented look on his face.

His eye wandered over the rich garden before him, and he thought of barren, ashen Mecca. Then he looked restlessly back over the landscape below. Surely it was fair enough to calm a restless spirit.

Immediately before, and to the eastward, the sun had risen out of a mass of lilac and rose-colored cloud. The tufted trees on the distant hills stood black and distinct against the splendor of the sky. To the right the date-groves of Kuba, famed throughout Arabia, struggled through a sea of mist that piled and surged in waves of amber and purple, leaving the tree tops like islands on a vapory sea. To the left the seared and scoriæ-covered crest of Mount Ohod rose, dark and scowling, like a grim sentinel on the borders of an Elysian valley. In the rear lay the plain of El Munakhah, and the rush of the torrent El Sayh was borne on the breeze, bearing the willing mind beyond to the cool groves of Kuba, whence this raging flood dispersed itself in gentle rills, or was carried in silent channels to turn the water-wheels, or to fall, with musical plash, into wooden troughs that lay deep in the shade.

The ripple of water,--ah, what it means to Arabian ears! Little wonder that the inhabitant of the desert land never omits it from his idea of paradise, save in his conception of the highest heaven,--a conception not lacking in sublimity--that of a silent looking upon the face of God.

In the immediate foreground lay El Medina itself, with its narrow streets, its busy bazars, its fair-skinned people, and its low, yellow, flat-roofed houses, each with its well and court-yard, nestling cozily among the feathery-fronded date-trees.

From the Eastern Road, a caravan from the Nejd was descending slowly into the town, and so clear was the atmosphere that Amzi could distinguish the huge, white dromedaries, and catch an occasional glint of a green shugduf, or the gorgeous litter of a grandee, trapped in scarlet and gold.

It was indeed a fair scene, and Amzi enjoyed it to the full with the keen enjoyment of one who possesses an esthetic temperament, an intense love of the beautiful. Yet he began to feel lonely in this town of his adoption. It was long since he had seen Yusuf, and he commenced to think seriously of returning for a time to Mecca.

Besides, he was tired of waiting for Mohammed's long-deferred visit, and he was anxious again to see the man whose strange fascination over him he scarcely dared to acknowledge even to himself. The emptiness and idleness of his own life was beginning to pall upon him, and he compared unfavorably his sluggish existence with the busy, quietly energetic way in which Yusuf was spending his days.

One source of unfailing pleasure to him had been the companionship of Dumah, who had followed him to Medina, but was wandering about as usual, returning to Amzi when tired or hungry, as a birdling returns to its mother's wing.

And Amzi had almost a mother's love for the boy, for poor Dumah seemed a child still; he had grown but little, his face was paler than of old, his eyes were as large and blue, and his bright hair fell in the same soft curls above his regular and clear-cut features. Like Yusuf, Amzi felt that the orphan's very helplessness was an appeal to his heart, and he did not lock its doors.

Dumah now came in wearily. He lay down at Amzi's feet and put his head on his knee. The Meccan stroked his soft hair gently.

"Where has my Dumah been?" he asked tenderly.

"Watching the people going out foolishly. Dumah would not go with them."

"Going where, lad?"

"Out to the gardens where the lotus blows, and the date-palms wave, and the citron and orange grow."

"And why go they, then, foolishly?" smiled Amzi.

"Because they go to meet him, and they are carrying white robes, and they will bring him in as a prince,--the wicked one, who would place himself above our blessed Master!"

Amzi started up quickly, and threw his pipe down.

"Is Mohammed here?" he cried.

"He is here. But you will not go too, Amzi? Alas that I told you! The angels I see in my dreams do not smile, they look away and vanish when I think of Mohammed. Yusuf does not love him! Let not Amzi!" pleaded the orphan.

But the Meccan was gone. Hastening on towards the outskirts of the city, he met a great crowd of people, pressing about Mohammed and Abu Beker, each of whom was dressed in a white garment, and riding triumphantly upon a white camel, the prophet being mounted on his own beast El Kaswa.

The little peddler, assigning himself a lower place, rode behind on a pack-mule.

Mohammed had come, and was, from the very beginning, a monarch, surrounded by an army of blind devotees, believers in his holy mission, and slavishly obedient to his will.

Amzi took the prophet to his house, and there entertained him as a respected Meccan friend, until Mohammed's home was erected. It was at Amzi's house, too, that the nuptials of Mohammed and the beautiful Ayesha, also those of Ali and the prophet's daughter Fatimah, took place.

One of Mohammed's first acts was to have a mosque built, and, from it, morning and night the call to prayers was given:

"God is great! There is no God but God! Mohammed is the prophet of God! Come to prayers. Come to prayers! God is great!"

And from this mosque Mohammed exhorted with wondrous eloquence, the music of his voice falling like a spell on the multitudes, as they listened to teachings new and more living than the old, dead, superstitious idolatry to which they were in bondage; yet, had they known it, teachings whose choicest gems were but crumbs borrowed from the words of One who had preached in all meekness and love on the shores of Galilee and the hills of Palestine more than six hundred years before.

They listened in wonder to condemnation of their belief in polytheism.

"In the name of the most merciful God," Mohammed would say, "say God is one God, the Eternal God; he begetteth not, neither is he begotten, and there is not anyone like unto him!" Thus did he aim at the foundation of Christianity, seeking to overthrow belief in the "only begotten Son of God" as a divine factor of the Trinity. Jesus he recognized as a prophet, not as God's own Son; and, while he borrowed incessantly from the Scriptures, he refused to accept them, declaring that they had become perverted, and that the original Koran was a volume of Paradise, from which Gabriel rendered him transcripts, and was, therefore, the true word of God which had been laid from time everlasting on what he called the "preserved table," close to the throne of God in the highest heaven.

And yet, during the greater part of his career, the utterances of this strange, incomprehensible man were characterized by a seemingly real glow of philanthropy and an earnest solicitude for the salvation of his countrymen from the depths of moral and spiritual degradation into which they had fallen. A missionary spirit seemed to be in him, in strange contrast and incompatibility with the sacrilegious words that often fell from his lips.

In all the records of history there is nothing more wonderful than the marvelous success which attended Mohammed at Medina. Staid and sober merchantmen, men with gray heads, fiery youths, proselytes from the tribes of the desert, even women, flocked to him every day; and he soon realized that he had a vast army of converts ready to live or die for him, ready to fight for him until the last.

Amzi, alone, of all his followers, seemed to stand aloof, half-believing, yet unwilling to proclaim his belief openly; simply waiting, as he had waited all his life, to see the truth, yet too indolent to set out bravely in the quest. He preferred to look on from aside; to weigh and calculate motives, actions and results; to judge men by their fruits, though the doing so called for long waiting.

Yet Amzi grew more and more dissatisfied. He felt, though he knew not its cause, the want of a rich spiritual life, that empty hollowness which pleasures of the world and the mere consciousness of a moral life cannot satisfy.

More than once he was tempted to declare himself a follower of the prophet, but he put it off until a riper season.

Poor Dumah noted Amzi's frequent visits to the mosque with a vague dread. He had an instinctive dislike of Mohammed, whose assumptions of superiority to Jesus he understood in a hazy way, and resented with all his might.

One day he entered with a tablet of soft stone to which a cord was attached. Putting the cord about Amzi's neck, he said:

"Amzi, promise your Dumah that you will wear this always, will you not? Because Dumah might die, and could not say the words any more. Promise me!"

"I promise you," smiled Amzi, and Dumah left the room contented.

Amzi turned the tablet over, and read the familiar words traced upon the soft stone,--the words recognized as the corner-stone of Christianity:

"God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Amzi smiled, and put the tablet in his bosom.