his deliberate aims towards its humiliation. With diplomacy, with
caution, by cruelty, cajolements, threatenings, and slaughter he had made
his position sufficiently stable to attack her. Now she lay at his feet,
acknowledging him her master--Mecca, the headstone of Arabia, the
inviolate city whose traditions spoke of her kinship with the heroes and
prophets of an earlier world.

Henceforward the command of Arabia was but a question of time. With Mecca
subdued his anxiety for the fate of his creed was at an end. As far as
the mastery of the surrounding country was concerned, all that was needed
was vigilance and promptitude. These two qualities he possessed in
fullest measure, and he had efficient soldiery, informed with a devoted
enthusiasm, to supplement his diplomacy. He was still to encounter
resistance, even defeat, but none that could endanger the final success
of his cause within Arabia. Full of exaltation he settled the affairs of
his now subject city, altered its usages to conform to his own, and
conciliated its members by clemency and goodwill.

The conquest of Mecca marks a new period in the history of Islam, a
period which places it perpetually among the ruling factors of the East,
and removes it for ever from the condition of a diffident minor state
struggling with equally powerful neighbours. Islam is now the master
power in Arabia, mightier than the Kureisch, than the Bedouin tribes or
any idolaters, soon to fare beyond the confines of its peninsula to
impose its rigid code and resistless enthusiasm upon the peoples dwelling
both to the east and west of its narrow cradle.

CHAPTER XIX

MAHOMET, VICTOR

"Now hath God helped you in many battlefields and on the day
of Honein, when ye prided yourselves on your numbers but it availed
you nothing ... then ye turned your backs in flight. Then did God
lend down his spirit of repose upon his Apostle and upon the Faithful,
and he sent down the hosts which ye saw not and punished the
Infidels."--_The Kuran._

Mahomet's triumph at Mecca was not left long undisturbed. If the Kureisch
had yielded in the face of his superior armies, the great tribe of the
Hawazin were by no means minded to suffer his lordship, indeed they
determined forthwith vigorously to oppose it. They were devoted to
idol-worship, and leaven of Mahomet's teaching had not effected even
remotely their age-long faith. They now saw themselves face to face not
only with a relig