r Abd al Muttalib and told him the marvels she had
seen and heard, and his grandfather took the child and presented him in
the Kaaba, after the manner of the Jews, and gave him the name Mahomet
(the Praised One), according as the angel had commanded Amina.

The countless legends surrounding Mahomet's birth, even to the physical
marvel that accompanied it, cannot be set aside as utterly worthless.
They serve to show the temper of the nation producing them, deeply
imaginative and incoherently poetical, and they indicate the weight of
the personality to which they cling. All the devotion of the East
informs them; but since the spirit that caused them to be is in its
essence one of relentless activity, neither contemplative nor
mystic, they lack that subtle sweetness that belongs to the Buddhist and
Christian histories, and dwell rather within the region of the
marvellous than of the spiritually symbolic. Neither Mahomet's father
nor mother are known to us in any detail; they are merely the passive
instruments of Mahomet's prophetic mission. His real parents are his
grandfather and his uncle Abu Talib; but more than these, the desert
that nurtured him, physically and mentally, that bounded his horizon
throughout his life and impressed its mighty mysteries upon his
unconscious childhood and his eager, imaginative youth.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD

"Paradise lies at the feet of mothers."--MAHOMET.

No more beautiful and tender legends cluster round Mahomet than those
which grace his life in the desert under the loving care of his
foster-mother Hailima. She was a woman of the tribe of Beni Sa'ad, who
for generations had roamed the desert, tent-dwellers, who visited cities
but rarely, and kept about them the remoteness and freedom of their
adventurous life beneath the sun and stars.

About the time of Mahomet's birth a famine fell upon the Beni Sa'ad,
which left nothing of all their stores, and the women of the tribe
journeyed,[28] weary and stricken with hunger, into the city of Mecca
that they might obtain foster-children whose parents would give them
money and blessings if they could but get their little ones taken away
from that unhealthy place. Among these was Hailima, who, according to
tradition, has left behind her the narrative of that dreadful journey
across the desert with her husband and her child, and with only an ass
and a she-camel for transport. Famine oppressed them sorely, together
with the heat of d