THE Moslem’s pilgrimage is a familiar word to the Christian’s ear, yet how few are acquainted with the nature or the signification of the rite! Unto the present day, learned men—even those who make a pretence to some knowledge of the East—still confound Meccah, the birthplace, with El Medinah, the burial-place, of Mohammed, the Arab law-giver. “The Prophet’s tomb at Meccah” is a mistake which even the best-informed of our journals do not disdain to make.
Before, however, entering upon the journey which procured for me the title “haji,” it is necessary for me to dispose of a few preliminaries which must savour of the personal. The first question that suggests itself is, “What course of study enabled an Englishman to pass unsuspected through the Moslem’s exclusive and jealously guarded Holy Land?”
I must premise that in the matter of assuming an Oriental nationality, Nature was somewhat propitious to me. Golden locks and blue eyes, however per se desirable, would have been sad obstacles to progress
in swarthy Arabia. And to what Nature had begun, art contributed by long years of laborious occupation.
Finding Oxford, with its Greek and Latin, its mysteries of δε and γαρ, and its theology and mathematics, exceedingly monotonous, I shipped myself for India and entered life in the 18th Sepoy Regiment of the Bombay Presidency. With sundry intervals of travel, my career between 1843 and 1849 was spent in Scinde. This newly conquered province was very Mohammedan, and the conquerors were compelled, during the work of organisation, to see more of the conquered than is usual in England’s East Indian possession. Sir Charles Napier, of gallant memory, our Governor and Commander-in-Chief, honoured me with a staff appointment, and humoured my whim by allowing me to wander about the new land as a canal engineer employed upon its intricate canal system. My days and nights were thus spent among the people, and within five years I was enabled to pass examinations in six Eastern languages.
In 1849 (March 30th-September 5th) an obstinate rheumatic ophthalmia, the result of overwork, sent me back to Europe, where nearly three years were passed before I was pronounced cured. Then, thoroughly tired of civilisation and living “dully sluggardised at home,” and pining for the breath of the desert and the music of the date-palm, I volunteered in the autumn of 1852 to explore the great waste of Eastern and Central Arabia—that huge white blot which still disgraces our best maps. But the
Court of Directors of the then Honourable East India Company, with their mild and amiable chairman, after deliberation, stoutly refused. They saw in me only another victim, like Stoddard Connolly and the brave brothers Wyburd, rushing on his own destruction and leaving behind him friends and family to trouble with their requisitions the peace and quiet of the India House.
What remained to me but to prove that what might imperil others was to me safe? Supplied with the sinews of travel by the Royal Geographical Society, curious to see what men are mostly content to hear of only—namely, Moslem inner life in a purely Mohammedan land—and longing to set foot within the mysterious Meccah which no vacation tourist had ever yet measured, sketched, photographed, and described, I resolved, coûte qu’il coûte, to make the attempt in my old character of a dervish. The safest as well as the most interesting time would be during the pilgrimage season.
The Moslem’s hajj, or pilgrimage, means, I must premise, “aspiration,” and expresses man’s conviction that he is but a wayfarer on earth wending towards a nobler world. This explains the general belief of the men in sandaled shoon that the greater their hardships, the sorer to travel the road to Jordan, the higher will be their reward in heaven. The pilgrim is urged by the voice of his soul—“O thou, toiling so fiercely for worldly pleasure and for transitory profit, wilt thou endure nothing to win a more lasting boon?”
Hence it is that pilgrimage is common to all ancient faiths. The Sabæans, or old Arabians, visited the Pyramids as the sepulchres of Seth and his son Sabi, the founder of their sect. The classical philosophers wandered through the Valley of the Nile. The Jews annually went up to Jerusalem. The Tartar Buddhists still journey to distant Lamaserais, and the Hindus to Egypt, to Tibet, to Gaya, on the Ganges, and to the inhospitable Caucasus. The spirit of pilgrimage animated mediæval Europe, and a learned Jesuit traveller considers the processions of the Roman Catholic Church modern vestiges of the olden rite.