To-day Kosseir is a stopping place for Egyptian pilgrims on their way to Jidda. It used to be much more important in that respect than now. It had many inns and hotel tents outside, and was well supplied with dancing girls and the other side-show features of a true pilgrimage centre. Then the Suez Canal came and killed it. Its big houses fallen to ruins, the port has become a village of one-story huts. There are emerald mines near it, however, and the desert about shows evidences of having been once worked for gold.
I regret that I was not able to stop at Jidda, the port of Mecca, to which I have already referred. It is one of the most interesting places on the Red Sea, for one hundred thousand or more pilgrims pass through it every year. While at Omdurman, in the Sudan, I saw something like fourteen hundred Mohammedans on their way by railroad across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan where they expected to get a ship for Jidda. Some of them had been ten years on the way, yet their religious enthusiasm had not waned. They had started out upon camels from the borders of Timbuktu and had been forced to sell their mounts to buy food. After that they had walked from oasis to oasis earning enough money to carry them onward. There were so many in the party that the British government officials had to divide them up into batches and send on a trainload or so at a time.
In the centuries since the worship of Mohammed began millions of pilgrims have walked over the sixty-five miles of hot sand from Jidda to Mecca. Worshippers go thither from all parts of North Africa and from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as well as from India and southern Arabia. Jidda takes her toll from each of them. The people live by fleecing the devotees. The town, though full of hotels, is noted for its discomforts. It has a poor water supply and after each big rain there is an epidemic of fever.
The projected railroad from Jidda to Mecca will probably pay well, for the travel is enormous. Twenty-five years ago more than sixty thousand Mohammedans came annually by sea to make their way over the sands to Mecca and Medina. There are perhaps half again as many more to-day, and the railroad will so reduce the cost of the trip that the number of worshippers will be greatly increased. Indeed, the day may come when some Mohammedan tourist agent will be selling to pilgrims from all parts of the Moslem world round-trip tickets to the birthplace of the Prophet, including admission to the Kaaba.
With Mecca accessible by railroad there may be a chance for Christians to visit the holy city of Islam. All who have been there in the past have had to go in disguise, and the man who would attempt it to-day takes his life in his hand. The railroad will be officered by Mohammedans, and it is doubtful whether they will take Christians as passengers. They will have to cater to the pilgrims, as it is from them that their traffic must come.
Meantime, without wishing to act as did the fox who called the grapes sour, I do not believe there is much to see in Mecca, after all. The town lies in a hot, arid valley watered for most of the year by a few brackish wells and some cisterns. The best water, which comes in from Arafat through a little aqueduct, is sold at high prices by a water trust at the head of which is the governor of the city.
Mecca, I am told, has only about fifty thousand inhabitants. It fills the valley and runs up the sides of the hills. The houses are of dark stone, built in one, two, and three stories overhanging close to the streets. There are no pavements; it is often dusty, and one would have to feel all the holiness of the surroundings to make life agreeable for him in such an unattractive spot.
The most important place in Mecca is the sacred mosque and the most important thing in the mosque is the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building which stands in its centre. In the southeast corner of this building, at about five feet from the ground, is the black meteorite that the Mohammedans say was once a part of the Gates of Paradise. When Adam was cast out, this stone fell with him, dropping down near Mecca. At that time, they say, it was a beautiful white colour, but it is now turned to jet, having been blackened by the kisses of sinners. Every pilgrim who comes to Mecca presses his lips to it again and again, imagining that as he does so his sins go out of him into the stone, and his soul becomes as pure as it was when he was a baby. There are several hundred thousand pilgrims who perform this act every season, so that the holy stone of the Kaaba gets its millions of kisses each year. What a load of sin it must carry!