While we go now to bring the Wanderer up, it should not be forgotten
that the house, completely furnished, is awaiting him, and he has only
to knock at the door, enter, and be at home.




CHAPTER II

THE PILGRIM AT EL KATIF


The bay of Bahrein indents the western shore of the Persian Gulf. Hard
by the point on the north at which it begins its inland bend rise the
whitewashed, one-story mud-houses of the town El Katif. Belonging to the
Arabs, the most unchangeable of peoples, both the town and the bay were
known in the period of our story by their present names.

The old town in the old time derived importance chiefly from the road
which, leading thence westwardly through Hejr Yemameh, brought up, after
many devious stretches across waterless wastes of sand, at El Derayeh, a
tented capital of the Bedouins, and there forked, one branch going to
Medina, the other to Mecca. In other words, El Katif was to Mecca on the
east the gate Jeddo was to it on the west.

When, in annual recurrence, the time for the indispensable Hajj, or
Pilgrimage, came, the name of the town was on the lips of men and women
beyond the Green Sea, and southwardly along the coast of Oman, and in
the villages and dowars back of the coast under the peaks of Akdar, only
a little less often than those of the holy cities. Then about the first