After this flight, I think I can afford to omit the string of quotations concerning Damascus, which is celebrated with an equal extravagance.  Ibn Batuta gives a very careful account of the great mosque, including its priests and scholars.  During his stay the plague raged with such violence that the deaths at one time amounted to two thousand a day.  He relates one circumstance which shows that even religious intolerance vanished in times of distress.  ’All the inhabitants of the city, men, women, large and small, took part in a procession to the Mosque of El-Akdam, two miles south of Damascus.  The Jews came forth with their Pentateuch, and the Christians with their Gospel, followed by their women and children.  All wept, supplicated, and sought help from God, through the means of his Word and his prophets.  They repaired to the mosque, where they remained, praying and invoking God, until three o’clock in the afternoon.  Then they returned to the city, made the prayer of Friday, and the Lord consoled them.’

On the 1st of September, 1326, he left Damascus, with the great caravan of pilgrims, for Mecca.  He enumerates all the stations on the route, and his itinerary is almost identical with that which the caravan follows at the present day.  Much space is devoted to a description of the religious observances which he followed; and, singularly enough, if any confirmation of his fidelity as a narrator were needed, it is furnished by the work of Captain Burton.  The account of the sacred cities of Medineh and Mecca corresponds in every important particular with that of the modern traveler.  Thus the integrity of Ibn Batuta, like that of Marco Polo, is established, after the lapse of five hundred years.

In speaking of the chair of Mohammed, which is preserved in the mosque at Medineh, he relates the following beautiful tradition:  ’It is said that the ambassador of God at first preached near the trunk of a palm-tree in the mosque, and that after he had constructed the chair and transported it thither, the trunk of the palm-tree groaned, as the female camel groans after her young.  Mohammed thereupon went down to the tree and embraced it; after which it remained silent.  The Prophet said, “If I had not embraced it, it would have continued to groan until the day of the resurrection."’

After faithfully performing all the observances prescribed for the pilgrim to Mecca, Ibn Batuta left that city and returned to Medineh.  He then crossed the Arabian peninsula in a north-eastern direction, to the city of Meshed Ali, near the Euphrates, and thence descended that river to Bassora.  Here he gives us two amusing anecdotes, which reflectively illustrate his shrewdness and the sturdiness with which he maintained his religious views.  ‘The inhabitants of Bassora,’ says he, ’are gifted with a generous character.  They are familiar with strangers, rendering them that which is their due, in such a manner that no one finds a sojourn among them tiresome.