According to the Arabian legend Adam, after his expulsion from the Garden, worshipped Allah on this spot.  A tent was then sent down from heaven, but Seth substituted a hut for the tent.  After the Flood, Abraham and Ishmael rebuilt the Kaaba.

At present it is a cube-shaped, flat-roofed building of stone in the Great Mosque at Mecca.  In its southeast corner next to the silver door is the famous black stone “hajar al aswud,” dropped from paradise.  It was said to have been originally a white stone (by other accounts a ruby), but the tears—­or more probably the kisses—­of pilgrims have turned it quite black.

[50] Palmer has it:  “In the mean time Mahomet and Abu-Bekr escaped by a back window in the house of the latter.”

[51] Zem-sem, the name of this well, is said by the Moslems to be the spring which Hagar had revealed to her when driven into the wilderness with her son, Ishmael.

[52] Friday remains the Sabbath of the Moslems.

[53] His nephew and son-in-law, surnamed “the Lion-hearted.”

[54] The Persians add these words, “and Ali is the friend of God.”  Kouli Khan, having a mind to unite the two different sects, ordered them to be omitted.—­Fraser’s Life of Kouli Khan, p. 124.

[55] An Arab of Kossay, named Ammer Ibn Lahay, is said to have first introduced idolatry among his countrymen; he brought the idol called Hobal, from Hyt in Mesopotamia, and set it up in the Kaaba.  It was the Jupiter of the Arabians, and was made of red agate in the form of a man holding in his hand seven arrows without heads or feathers, such as the Arabs use in divination.  At a subsequent period the Kaaba was adorned with three hundred and sixty idols, corresponding probably to the days of the Arabian year.—­Burckhardt’s Arabia, pp. 163, 164.

[56] An opinion as ancient as Homer.—­Iliad, vi. 487.

[57] Several stories have been told as the occasion of Mahomet’s prohibiting the drinking of wine.  Busbequius says:  “Mahomet, making a journey to a friend at noon, entered into his house, where there was a marriage feast; and sitting down with the guests, he observed them to be very merry and jovial, kissing and embracing one another, which was attributed to the cheerfulness of their spirits raised by the wine; so that he blessed it as a sacred thing in being thus an instrument of much love among men.  But returning to the same house the next day, he beheld another face of things, as gore-blood on the ground, a hand cut off, an arm, foot, and other limbs dismembered, which he was told was the effect of the brawls and fightings occasioned by the wine, which made them mad, and inflamed them into a fury, thus to destroy one another.  Whereon he changed his mind, and turned his former blessing into a curse, and forbade wine ever after to all his disciples.” (Epist. 3.) “This prohibition of wine hindered many of the prophet’s contemporaries from embracing his