interpret them as voices of demons, or as the voice of one
commanding him to do some deed. This hallucination, in turn,
becomes an apperceiving organ, _i.e._, other perceptions and
ideas are assimilated to it: it becomes a center about which
many ideas gather and are correspondingly
distorted."--_McLellan, Psychology._


Upon the evening of the following day, Amzi and Yusuf set out in quest
of Mohammed, to whom the manuscript had not yet been given. Stopping at
the house of Cadijah, a stone building having some pretensions to
grandeur, they learned that Mohammed had left the city. Accordingly,
thinking he would probably be found in the Cave of Hira, they took a
by-path towards the mountains.

The sun was hot, but a pleasant breeze blew from the plains towards the
Nejd, and, from the elevation which they now ascended, Yusuf noted with
interest a scene every point of which was entirely different from that
of his Persian home--different perhaps from that of any other spot on
the face of the earth; a scene desolate, wild, and barren, yet destined
to be the cradle of a mighty movement that was ere long to agitate the
entire peninsula of Arabia, and eventually to exercise its baneful
influence over a great part of the Eastern Hemisphere.[7]

Below him lay the long, narrow, sandy valley. No friendly group of palms
arose to break its dreary monotony; no green thing, save a few parched
aloes, was there to form a pleasant resting-place for the eye. The
passes below, those ever-populous roads leading to the Nejd, Syria,
Jeddah, and Arabia-Felix, were crowded with people; yet, even their
presence did not suffice to remove the air of deadness from the scene.