The heads of the party were bare; their countenances becomingly solemn;
their _Ihram_ fresh and spotlessly white. Passing slowly on, they were
conducted under several outside arches, and down a stairway into a hall,
where they left the umbrella and their shoes.

The visitor found himself then in a cloister of the Mosque with which
the area around the Kaaba is completely enclosed. There was a pavement
of undressed flags, and to the right and left a wilderness of tall
pillars tied together by arches, which in turn supported domes. Numbers
of people, bareheaded and barefooted, to whom the heat outside was
insupportable, were in refuge there; some, seated upon the stones,
revolved their rosaries; others walked slowly about. None spoke. The
silence was a tribute to the ineffable sanctity of the place. The
refreshing shade, the solemn hush, the whiteness of the garments were
suggestive of sepulchres and their spectral tenantry.

In the square whither the Prince next passed, the first object to
challenge his attention was the Kaaba itself. At sight of it he
involuntarily stopped.

The cloisters, seen from the square, were open colonnades. Seven
minarets, belted in red, blue and yellow, arose in columnar relief
against the sky and the mountains in the south. A gravelled plot
received from the cloisters; next that, toward the centre, was a narrow
pavement of rough stone in transverse extension down a shallow step to
another gravelled plot; then another pavement wider than the first, and
ending, like it, in a downward step; after which there was a third
sanded plot, and then a third pavement defined by gilded posts upholding
a continuous row of lamps, ready for lighting at the going down of the