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.