A few nights before his death, he awoke from a troubled sleep, and, starting wildly from his couch, sprang up with unnatural strength from his bed.
"Come, Belus!" he cried to an attendant. "Come with me to the burial-place of El Bakia! The dead call to me from their graves, and I must go thither to pray for them."
Alone they passed into the night; through the long, silent streets they walked like phantoms; up the white road of Nedj they glided, until the few low tombs of the cemetery to the southeast of the city were in sight.
At the border of the bleak, lonely field, where the wind moaned among the tombs like the sighing of a weeping Rachel, Mohammed paused.
"Peace be with you, O people of El Bakia!" he cried. "Peace be with you, martyrs of El Bakia! One and all, peace be with you! We verily, if Allah please, are about to join you! O Allah, pardon us and them! And the mercy of God and his blessings be upon us all!"
Thus he prayed, stretching his hands towards the spot where his friends lay in their long sleep. His companion stood in awe behind him, shivering in superstitious terror, as the white tombs gleamed like moving apparitions through the gloom, and the night-owls hooted with a mournful cadence o'er the dreary waste.
When he had concluded, the prophet turned towards home. But the excitement of mind which had endowed him with almost supernatural strength now deserted him. His steps grew feeble and he was fain to lean upon Belus on his painful way back.
He grew rapidly worse. His wife Ayesha, and his daughter Fatima, wife of Ali, seldom left his bedside. When the last came, he raised his eyes to the ceiling and exclaimed, "O Allah, pardon my sins!" He then, with his own feeble hand, sprinkled his face with water, and soon afterwards, with his head on Ayesha's bosom, he departed, in the sixty-third year of his age, and the eleventh year of the Hejira, A.D. 632.
The frenzied people would not believe that he was dead. "He will arise, like Jesus," they said. But no returning breath quivered through the cold lips or animated the rigid form of him whom they passionately called to life; and not until Abu Beker assured them that he was really no more, saying, "Did he not himself assure us that he must experience the common fate of all? Did he not say in the Koran, 'Mohammed is no more than an apostle; the other apostles have already deceased before him; if he die therefore, or be slain, will ye turn back on your heels?'"—not until then did they disperse, with deep groans.
Mohammed was buried in the house in which he died, his grave being dug in the spot beneath his bed; but some years later a stone tomb was erected over the grave, and until the present day the place is held so sacred that it is at the risk of his life that anyone but a Mussulman dares enter.