esert suns, until there was no sustenance for any
living creature; then, faint and travel-weary, they reached the city and
began their quest.

Mahomet was offered to every woman of the tribe, but they rejected him
as he had no father, and there was little hope of much payment from the
mothers of these children. Those of rich parents were eagerly spoken
for, but no one would care for the little fatherless child. And it
happened that Hailima also was unsuccessful in her search, and was like
to have returned to her people disconsolate, but when she saw
Mahomet she bethought herself and said to her husband:

"By the God of my fathers, I will not go back to my companions without
foster-child. I will take this orphan."

And her husband replied: "It cannot harm thee to do this, and if thou
takest him it may be that through him God will bless us."

So Hailima took him, and she relates how good fortune attended her from
that day. Her camels gave abundant milk during the homeward journey, and
in the unfruitful land of the Beni Sa'ad her cattle were always fattest
and yielded most milk, until her neighbours besought her to allow them
to pasture their cattle with hers. But, adds the chronicler naively, in
spite of this their cattle returned to them thin and yielding little,
while Hailima's waxed fat and fruitful. These legends are the translation
into poetic fact of the peace and love surrounding Mahomet during the five
years he spent with Hailima; for in all primitive communities every
experience must pass through transmutation into the definite and tangible
and be given a local habitation and a name.

When Mahomet was two years old and the time had come to restore him to
his mother, Hailima took him back to Mecca; but his mother gave him to
her again because he had thriven so well under desert skies, and she
feared the stifling air of Mecca for her only son. So Hailima returned
with him and brought him up as one of her children until he was five,
when the first signs of his nervous, highly-strung nature showed
themselves in a kind of epileptic fit. The Arabians, unskilled as they
were in any medical science, attributed manifestations of this kind to
evil spirits, and it is not surprising that we find Hailima bringing him
back to his grandfather in great alarm. So ended his fostering by the
desert and by Hailima.

Of these five years spent among the Beni Sa'ad chroniclers have spoken
in much detail, but their confused accoun