[257]. Not “visiting the tomb of” etc. but visiting the Prophet himself, who is said to have declared that “Ziyárah” (visitation) of his tomb was in religion the equivalent of a personal call upon himself.
[258]. Arab. “Nafakah”; for its conditions see Pilgrimage iii. 224. I have again and again insisted upon the Anglo-Indian Government enforcing the regulations of the Faith upon pauper Hindi pilgrims who go to the Moslem Holy Land as beggars and die of hunger in the streets. To an “Empire of Opinion” this is an unmitigated evil (Pilgrimage iii. 256); and now, after some thirty-four years, there are signs that the suggestions of common sense are to be adopted. England has heard of the extraordinary recklessness and inconsequence of the British-Indian “fellow subject.”
[259]. The Ka’abah of Meccah.
[260]. When Moslems apply “Nabí!” to Mohammed it is in the peculiar sense of “prophet” (προφήτης) = one who speaks before the people, not one who predicts, as such foresight was abjured by the Apostle. Dr. A. Neubauer (The Athenæum No. 3031) finds the root of “Nabí!” in the Assyrian Nabu and Heb. Noob (occurring in Exod. vii. i. “Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet.” i.e. orator, speaker before the people), and holds it to be a Canaanite term which supplanted “Roeh” (the Seer) e.g. 1 Samuel ix. 9. The learned Hebraist traces the cult of Nebo, a secondary deity in Assyria to Palestine and Phœnicia, Palmyra, Edessa (in the Nebok of Abgar) and Hierapolis in Syria or Mabug (Nabog?).
[261]. I cannot find “Dandán” even in Lib. Quintus de Aquaticis Animalibus of the learned Sam. Bochart’s “Hierozoïcon” (London, 1663) and must conjecture that as “Dandán” in Persian means a tooth (vol. ii. [83]) the writer applied it to a sun-fish or some such well-fanged monster of the deep.
[262]. A favourite proverb with the Fellah, when he alludes to the Pasha and to himself.
[263]. An euphemistic answer, unbernfen as the Germans say.
[264]. It is a temptation to derive this word from bœuf à l’eau, but I fear that the theory will not hold water. The “buffaloes” of Alexandria laughed it to scorn.
[265]. Here the writer’s zoological knowledge is at fault. Animals, which never or very rarely see man, have no fear of him whatever. This is well-known to those who visit the Gull-fairs at Ascension Island, Santos and many other isolated rocks; the hen birds will peck at the intruder’s ankles but they do not rise from off their eggs. For details concerning the “Gull-fair” of the Summer Islands consult p. 4 “The History of the Bermudas,” edited by Sir J. H. Lefroy for the Hakluyt Society, 1882. I have seen birds on Fernando Po peak quietly await a second shot; and herds of antelopes, the most timid of animals, in the plains of Somali-land only stared but were not startled by the report of the gun. But Arabs are not the only moralists who write zoological nonsense; witness the notable verse,
Birds in their little nests agree,