At length came the crisis. He was spending the sacred months on Mount Ḥirá, ‘a huge barren rock, torn by cleft and hollow ravine, standing out solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun, shadowless, flowerless, without well or rill.’ Here in a cave Moḥammad gave himself up to prayer and fasting. Long months or even years of doubt had increased his nervous excitable disposition. He had had, they say, cataleptic fits during his childhood, and was evidently more delicately and finely constituted than those around him. Given this nervous nature, and the grim solitude of the hill where he had almost lived for long weary months, blindly feeling after some truth upon which to rest his soul, it is not difficult to believe the tradition of the cave, that Moḥammad heard a voice say, ‘Cry!’ ‘What shall I cry?’ he answers—the question that has been burning his heart during all his mental struggles—
Cry[14]! in the name of thy Lord, who hath created;
He hath created man from a clot of blood.
Cry! and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful,
Who hath taught [writing] by the pen:
He hath taught man that which he knew not.
Moḥammad arose trembling, and went to Khadeejeh, and told her what he had seen; and she did her woman’s part, and believed in him and soothed his terror, and bade him hope for the future. Yet he could not believe in himself. Was he not perhaps mad, possessed by a devil? Were these voices of a truth from God? And so he went again on his solitary wanderings, hearing strange sounds, and thinking them at one time the testimony of Heaven, at another the temptings of Satan or the ravings of madness. Doubting, wondering, hoping, he had fain put an end to a life which had become intolerable in its changings from the heaven of hope to the hell of despair, when again he heard the voice, ‘Thou art the messenger of God, and I am Gabriel.’ Conviction at length seized hold upon him; he was indeed to bring a message of good tidings to the Arabs, the message of God through His angel Gabriel. He went back to Khadeejeh exhausted in mind and body. ‘Wrap me, wrap me,’ he said; and the word came unto him—
O thou enwrapped in thy mantle
Arise and warn!
And thy Lord,—magnify Him!