So Hailima took him, and she relates how good fortune attended her from
that day. Her camels gave abundant milk during the homeward journey, and
in the unfruitful land of the Beni Sa'ad her cattle were always fattest
and yielded most milk, until her neighbours besought her to allow them
to pasture their cattle with hers. But, adds the chronicler naively, in
spite of this their cattle returned to them thin and yielding little,
while Hailima's waxed fat and fruitful. These legends are the translation
into poetic fact of the peace and love surrounding Mahomet during the five
years he spent with Hailima; for in all primitive communities every
experience must pass through transmutation into the definite and tangible
and be given a local habitation and a name.

When Mahomet was two years old and the time had come to restore him to
his mother, Hailima took him back to Mecca; but his mother gave him to
her again because he had thriven so well under desert skies, and she
feared the stifling air of Mecca for her only son. So Hailima returned
with him and brought him up as one of her children until he was five,
when the first signs of his nervous, highly-strung nature showed
themselves in a kind of epileptic fit. The Arabians, unskilled as they
were in any medical science, attributed manifestations of this kind to
evil spirits, and it is not surprising that we find Hailima bringing him
back to his grandfather in great alarm. So ended his fostering by the
desert and by Hailima.

Of these five years spent among the Beni Sa'ad chroniclers have spoken
in much detail, but their confused accounts are so interwoven with
legend that it is impossible to re-create events, and we can only obtain
a general idea of his life as a tiny child among the children of the
tribe, sharing their fortunes, playing and quarrelling with them, and at
moments, when the spirit seemed to advance beyond its dwelling-place,