Having finished our prayers and ceremonies at the Mosque of Piety, we fought our way out through a crowd of importunate beggars, and turning a few paces to the left, halted near a small chapel adjoining the South-West angle of the larger temple.  We there stood at a grated window in the Western wall, and recited a Supplication, looking the while reverently at a dark dwarf archway under which the Lady Fatimah used to sit grinding grain in a hand-mill.  The Mosque in consequence bears the name of Sittna Fatimah.  A surly-looking Khadim, or guardian stood at the door demanding a dollar in the most authoritative Arab tone-we therefore did not enter.

At Al-Madinah and at Meccah the traveller’s hand must be perpetually in his pouch:  no stranger in Paris or in London is more surely or more severely taken in.  Already I began to fear that my eighty pounds would not suffice for all the expenses of sight-seeing, and the apprehension was justified by the sequel.  My only friend was the boy Mohammed, who displayed a fiery economy that brought him into considerable disrepute with his countrymen.  They saw with emotion that he was preaching parsimony to me solely that I might have more money to spend at Meccah under his auspices.  This being palpably the case, I threw all the blame of penuriousness upon the young Machiavel’s shoulders, and resolved, as he had taken charge of my finances at Al-Madinah, so at Meccah to administer them myself.

After praying at the window, to the great disgust of the Khadim, who openly asserted that we were “low

[p.412]fellows,” we passed through some lanes lined with beggars and Badawi children, till we came to a third little Mosque situated due South of the larger one.  This is called the Masjid Arafat, and is erected upon a mound also named Tall Arafat, because on one occasion the Prophet, being unable to visit the Holy Mountain at the pilgrimage season, stood there, saw through the intervening space, and in spirit performed the ceremony.  Here also we looked into a window instead of opening the door with a silver key, and the mesquin appearance of all within prevented my regretting the necessity of economy.  In India or in Sind every village would have a better Mosque.  Our last visit was to a fourth chapel, the Masjid Ali, so termed because the Apostle’s son-in-law had a house upon this spot.[FN#25] After praying there-and terribly hot the little hole was!-we repaired to the last place of visitation at Kuba-a large deep well called the Bir al-Aris, in a garden to the West of the Mosque of Piety, with a little oratory adjoining it.  A Persian wheel was going drowsily round, and the cool water fell into a tiny pool, whence it whirled and bubbled away in childish mimicry of a river.  The music sounded sweet in my ears; I stubbornly refused to do any more praying-though Shaykh Hamid, for form’s sake, reiterated with parental emphasis, “how very wrong it was,"-and I sat