CHAPTER XVI.
NUKHL — ON THE ROUTE OF PILGRIMS TO MECCA.
If some of my countrymen were to spend two days, as we did, at Nukhl, I am afraid they would describe it, with that elegance and felicity of speech which they sometimes employ, as "the most God-forsaken place on the face of the earth." It must be confessed that it has few external attractions. A vast, desolate plain, with not a palm-tree to relieve it; with not even soft sand under your feet, but a surface as hard as if it had been beaten down by the tread of armies, and swept by all the winds of heaven — that is Nukhl! A more bleak and cheerless waste could not be found on the steppes of Siberia, or even in the heart of the Sahara.
And yet there are not many spots to which I have come in my wanderings about the world, which awaken more associations than this same desolate plain. It is the "cross-roads" of two races and two religions — the Hebrew coming up from the South, from Sinai, bearing the Law of God to the land promised for his inheritance; and the Arab coming from the East, with the scimitar in his hand, to carry Islam into Africa. The Hebrew passed, and did not return; but where the Arab passed, the wave of Islam has continued to flow from that day to this. Mahomet was born in 570; the Hegira, or flight from Mecca, from which are reckoned all the dates in the Moslem Calendar, was in 622; and ten years later the Moslems were masters of Egypt, and no doubt established soon after the custom of
