Watching over Camels grazing.
But when he was weaned, Halimah was obliged to take Mohammad back to his mother who was eager to have him with her. What grief therefore for the poor wet-nurse! She could not resign herself to such cruel separation. As soon as she got to Makkah, she threw herself at Aminah's feet and burst out supplicating as she kissed them. 'See how the bracing air of the Badya hath profited thy child. Think that those breezes will do him still greater good now that he is beginning to walk. Fear the pestilential air of the city! Thou wouldst see him waste away before thine eyes and remember my words when it was too late.'
Moved by these touching prayers and thinking only of her son's health, Aminah stifled her motherly feelings and finished by consenting to let Halimah take Mohammad back to the Badya. His good-hearted nurse, buckling him securely to her loins, went off, overjoyed, on the road leading to her encampment.
Home again at the Badya of the Bani Sad, Mohammad's first footsteps were printed on the ripple-marked carpet of the immaculate sands, where he inhaled with welcome nostrils the sweet odours of the aromatic plants growing on the hillocks. And there it was he slept under the dark blue tent of the star-studded sky and his chest expanded, breathing the limpid air of desert nights. He grew strong, thanks to the healthy, wholesome food of the nomads: milk and cheese, with unleavened bread baked under hot ashes and, now and again, camel's flesh or mutton, devoid of the sickening smell of wool-grease that comes from animals bred in confined stabling.
Such moral and physical well-being, that he owed to the Badya, was of great help to him, during ordeals later in life. He was always pleased to recur to his childhood's days. 'Allah granted me two inestimable favours,' he would often say. 'First came the privilege of being born in the most noble of all the Arab tribes, the Quraish; secondly, that of being brought up in the Bani Sad region, the most salubrious of the entire Hijaz.'
Never were there effaced from his mind those pictures of the desert which were impressed on his earliest glances when, in company with other nomadic lads, he would climb to the top of a rock to watch over a grazing flock.
Notwithstanding, being inclined to dream and meditate, he did not agree very well with the turbulence and high spirits of the little Bedouins of his own age, and preferred to hide away from them, and ramble in solitude not too far from the tents.
MOHAMMAD AND THE TWO ANGELS