Chapter 30

THE DEATH OF MOHAMMED.

"Nothing can we call our own but death"--_Shakespeare._

While Musa thus lay dying in the tents of Nejd, the cold hand of death was fast closing upon another in the land of Arabia. Day by day the germs of disease pulsed stronger and stronger through the veins of Mohammed. Monarch of Arabia, originator of a creed which was eventually to push itself throughout Egypt, India, Afghanistan, Persia, and even to the wild steppes of Siberia, he must now die. He viewed the end with firmness, and it has been a matter of controversy as to whether in these later days he still had the hallucination of being a prophet.

Too feeble to walk to the mosque, he lay, tended by his wives, in the tent of Ayesha, his favorite. Not many days before his death he asked that he might be carried to the mosque. Willing arms bore him thither, and placed him in the pulpit, from whence he could look down upon the city, and away to the palm-groves of Kuba. Then, turning his face towards the holy city, Mecca, he addressed the crowds of waiting people below.

"If there be any man," said he, "whom I have unjustly scourged, I submit my own back to the lash of retaliation. Have I aspersed the reputation of any Mussulman?--let him proclaim my faults in the face of the congregation. Has anyone been despoiled of his goods?--the little that I possess shall compensate the principal and the interest of the debt."

He then liberated his slaves, gave directions as to the order of his funeral, and appointed Abu Beker to supply his place in offering public prayer. This seemed to indicate that Abu Beker was to be his successor in office; and the long-tried friend accordingly became the first caliph of the Saracen empire.

After this the prophet was conveyed again to the house of Ayesha. The fever increased, and the pain in his head became so great that he more than once pressed his hands upon it exclaiming, "The poison of Khaïbar! The poison of Khaïbar!"

Once, perceiving the mother of Bashar, the soldier who had died of the poison in the fatal city, he said:

"O mother of Bashar, the cords of my heart are now breaking of the food which I ate with your son at Khaïbar!"

At another time, springing up in delirium, he called for pen and ink that he might write a new revelation; but owing to his weak state, his request was refused. In talking to those about him he said that Azraël, the Angel of Death, had not dared to take his soul until he had asked his permission.

A few nights before his death, he awoke from a troubled sleep, and, starting wildly from his couch, sprang up with unnatural strength from his bed.

"Come, Belus!" he cried to an attendant. "Come with me to the burial-place of El Bakia! The dead call to me from their graves, and I must go thither to pray for them."

Alone they passed into the night; through the long, silent streets they walked like phantoms; up the white road of Nedj they glided, until the few low tombs of the cemetery to the southeast of the city were in sight.

At the border of the bleak, lonely field, where the wind moaned among the tombs like the sighing of a weeping Rachel, Mohammed paused.

"Peace be with you, O people of El Bakia!" he cried. "Peace be with you, martyrs of El Bakia! One and all, peace be with you! We verily, if Allah please, are about to join you! O Allah, pardon us and them! And the mercy of God and his blessings be upon us all!"

Thus he prayed, stretching his hands towards the spot where his friends lay in their long sleep. His companion stood in awe behind him, shivering in superstitious terror, as the white tombs gleamed like moving apparitions through the gloom, and the night-owls hooted with a mournful cadence o'er the dreary waste.

When he had concluded, the prophet turned towards home. But the excitement of mind which had endowed him with almost supernatural strength now deserted him. His steps grew feeble and he was fain to lean upon Belus on his painful way back.

He grew rapidly worse. His wife Ayesha, and his daughter Fatima, wife of Ali, seldom left his bedside. When the last came, he raised his eyes to the ceiling and exclaimed, "O Allah, pardon my sins!" He then, with his own feeble hand, sprinkled his face with water, and soon afterwards, with his head on Ayesha's bosom, he departed, in the sixty-third year of his age, and the eleventh year of the Hejira, A.D. 632.

The frenzied people would not believe that he was dead. "He will arise, like Jesus," they said. But no returning breath quivered through the cold lips or animated the rigid form of him whom they passionately called to life; and not until Abu Beker assured them that he was really no more, saying, "Did he not himself assure us that he must experience the common fate of all? Did he not say in the Koran, 'Mohammed is no more than an apostle; the other apostles have already deceased before him; if he die therefore, or be slain, will ye turn back on your heels?'"--not until then did they disperse, with deep groans.

Mohammed was buried in the house in which he died, his grave being dug in the spot beneath his bed; but some years later a stone tomb was erected over the grave, and until the present day the place is held so sacred that it is at the risk of his life that anyone but a Mussulman dares enter.