How often must, amid discordant din,
Another’s Voice be toned to take you in!
“‘Yet ah, my heart, among thy darling foes,
Was one that matched both Nightingale and Rose;
A Flow’r, she bloomed a day; a Bird, her flight
She winged ... and turned thy Day to endless Night.’”
“Alas, my poor heart, its disease is incurable, I fear. No matter. Safá awaits our coming. We will go and ‘declare our intention,’ and then be off to the hill of Purity. Let us skip and hop, for to-morrow we die. Yá-Allah! yá-Muhammad!” So, approaching as near as we could to the Black Stone, we closed our eyes, giving it as our determination to run seven times between the platforms of Safá and Marveh, and to recite the prescribed prayers at the appointed places. It is considered an act of grace in the devout to proceed thence to the Zem-Zem well, and, drawing a bucket of water by means of the windlass with his own hands, to besprinkle therewith his head and back and stomach, after which he should drink a handful of the water, repeating the following prayer: “O Lord, I beseech Thee to make this draught for me a source of inexhaustible knowledge, a vast livelihood, and a preventive of all pains and diseases.”
THE POORER SIDE OF EGYPTIAN MUSLIMS.
Frequent allusion is made to this spring in Arabian and Persian literature. Its water ranks second to that of Kúsar, a stream that runs in the Garden of Paradise, keeping the grass ever green and the flowers ever blooming. The prettiest ruby wine is compared by the poets to the water of Zem-Zem; for they believe it to be the spring that “gushed out for the relief of Ishmael,” when Hagar, his mother, wandered beside him in the wilderness. The story goes that when she saw the bubbling water it was to call to her son, in the Egyptian tongue, “Zem, zem!” (“Stay, stay!”). The taste of the water is difficult to describe, but it is certainly bitterish. My guide, to whom I had appealed in the matter, answered, saying, “Allah—may I be His sacrifice—has made this water sacred, as you know. It is neither sweet nor bitter, neither fresh nor salt, neither scented nor stinking, but would appear in its taste to be a mixture of all these qualities. In everything sacred there must be a mystery, or how could the mullás live?” As to its attributes, they may be counted by the hundred. There is no disease that it will not cure provided it be taken with a “pure” conscience. It is as inspiring to a Muslim poet as that of Helicon to an unbeliever. It prolongs life and purifies the soul of him that drinks it in unswerving obedience to God through the mediation of Muhammad. The rich pilgrims carried gold or silver flasks in which they poured the precious water, keeping it as a preservative of health, or as a remedy in case of sickness. An Indian Prince told me that he intended to keep his in order to restore the eyesight of his brother, who had been unable to accompany him on the pilgrimage. The Faithful bring their winding-sheets along with them and wash them in the holy spring. Some Negroes from Zanzibar have the honour to be the guardians of the well and the dispensers of its contents, and they exact as much as twenty piastres from the poor pilgrims for the washing of one of these winding-sheets, and ten times that amount from the rich.