Meantime, without wishing to act as did the fox who called the grapes sour, I do not believe there is much to see in Mecca, after all. The town lies in a hot, arid valley watered for most of the year by a few brackish wells and some cisterns. The best water, which comes in from Arafat through a little aqueduct, is sold at high prices by a water trust at the head of which is the governor of the city. Mecca, I am told, has only about fifty thousand inhabitants. It fills the valley and runs up the sides of the hills. The houses are of dark stone, built in one, two, and three stories overhanging close to the streets. There are no pavements; it is often dusty, and one would have to feel all the holiness of the surroundings to make life agreeable for him in such an unattractive spot. The most important place in Mecca is the sacred mosque and the most important thing in the mosque is the Kaaba, a cube-shaped stone building which stands in its centre. In the southeast corner of this building, at about five feet from the ground, is the black meteorite that the Mohammedans say was once a part of the Gates of Paradise. When Adam was cast out, this stone fell with him, dropping down near Mecca. At that time, they say, it was a beautiful white colour, but it is now turned to jet, having been blackened by the kisses of sinners. Every pilgrim who comes to Mecca presses his lips to it again and again, imagining that as he does so his sins go out of him into the stone, and his soul becomes as pure as it was when he was a baby. There are several hundred thousand pilgrims who perform this act every season, so that the holy stone of the Kaaba gets its millions of kisses each year. What a load of sin it must carry! CHAPTER XXVII ALONG THE AFRICAN COAST The two chief ports on the African coast of the Red Sea are Port Sudan and Suakim. They were nothing until the completion of the Red Sea road. The original plan was to use Suakim as the terminus of the Sudan railway. The English surveyors, however, finding a much better harbour at Port Sudan, extended the railroad to that point. The town which was a mere village a few years ago has now several thousand people, and grows like one of the mushroom settlements of the Canadian west.