marvel that accompanied it, cannot be set aside as utterly worthless.
They serve to show the temper of the nation producing them, deeply
imaginative and incoherently poetical, and they indicate the weight of
the personality to which they cling. All the devotion of the East
informs them; but since the spirit that caused them to be is in its
essence one of relentless activity, neither contemplative nor
mystic, they lack that subtle sweetness that belongs to the Buddhist and
Christian histories, and dwell rather within the region of the
marvellous than of the spiritually symbolic. Neither Mahomet's father
nor mother are known to us in any detail; they are merely the passive
instruments of Mahomet's prophetic mission. His real parents are his
grandfather and his uncle Abu Talib; but more than these, the desert
that nurtured him, physically and mentally, that bounded his horizon
throughout his life and impressed its mighty mysteries upon his
unconscious childhood and his eager, imaginative youth.




CHAPTER II


CHILDHOOD

"Paradise lies at the feet of mothers."--MAHOMET.

No more beautiful and tender legends cluster round Mahomet than those
which grace his life in the desert under the loving care of his
foster-mother Hailima. She was a woman of the tribe of Beni Sa'ad, who
for generations had roamed the desert, tent-dwellers, who visited cities