When I heard of the king's oath, I shore my head, and now I send him a sack of the earth of Yemen that he may put it under his feet and fulfil his oath." The Najáshí answered this act of submission by appointing Abraha to be his viceroy.... Then Abraha built the church (_al-Qalís_) at San‘á, the like of which was not to be seen at that time in the whole world, and wrote to the Najáshí that he would not be content until he had diverted thither every pilgrim in Arabia. This letter made much talk, and a man of the Banú Fuqaym, one of those who arranged the calendar, was angered by what he learned of Abraha's purpose; so he went into the church and defiled it. When Abraha heard that the author of the outrage belonged to the people of the Temple in Mecca, and that he meant to show thereby his scorn and contempt for the new foundation, he waxed wroth and swore that he would march against the Temple and lay it in ruins. [Sidenote: Sayf b. Dhí Yazan.] [Sidenote: The Persians in Yemen (_circa_ 572 A.D.).] The disastrous failure of this expedition, which took place in the year of the Elephant (570 A.D.), did not at once free Yemen from the Abyssinian yoke. The sons of Abraha, Yaksum and Masrúq, bore heavily on the Arabs. Seeing no help among his own people, a noble Ḥimyarite named Sayf b. Dhí Yazan resolved to seek foreign intervention. His choice lay between the Byzantine and Persian empires, and he first betook himself to Constantinople. Disappointed there, he induced the Arab king of Ḥíra, who was under Persian suzerainty, to present him at the court of Madá’in (Ctesiphon). How he won audience of the Sásánian monarch, Núshírwán, surnamed the Just, and tempted him by an ingenious trick to raise a force of eight hundred condemned felons, who were set free and shipped to Yemen under the command of an aged general; how they literally 'burned their boats' and, drawing courage from despair, routed the Abyssinian host and made Yemen a satrapy of Persia[73]--this forms an almost epic narrative, which I have omitted here (apart from considerations of space) because it belongs to Persian rather than to Arabian literary history, being probably based, as Nöldeke has suggested, on traditions handed down by the Persian conquerors who settled in Yemen to their aristocratic descendants whom the Arabs called _al-Abná_ (the Sons) or _Banu ’l-Aḥrár_ (Sons of the Noble). Leaving the once mighty kingdom of Yemen thus pitiably and for ever fallen from its high estate, we turn northward into the main stream of Arabian history. CHAPTER II THE HISTORY AND LEGENDS OF THE PAGAN ARABS [Sidenote: The Age of Barbarism (al-Jáhiliyya).]