cities and the adjacent Bedouin territories. About A.D. 960 they established a sort of kingdom with Mecca as capital. The influence of the princes of Mecca has varied from time to time, according to the strength of the foreign protectorate in the Hejaz or in consequence of feuds among the branches of the house; until about 1882 it was for most purposes much greater than that of the Turks. The latter were strong enough to hold the garrisoned towns, and thus the sultan was able within certain limits--playing off one against the other the two rival branches of the aristocracy, viz. the kin of Ghalib and the house of Ibn'Aun--to assert the right of designating or removing the sherif, to whom in turn he owed the possibility of maintaining, with the aid of considerable pensions, the semblance of his much-prized lordship over the holy cities. The grand sherif can muster a considerable force of freedmen and clients, and his kin, holding wells and lands in various places through the Hejaz, act as his deputies and administer the old Arabic customary law to the Bedouin. To this influence the Hejaz owes what little of law and order it enjoys. During the last quarter of the 19th century Turkish influence became preponderant in western Arabia, and the railway from Syria to the Hejaz tended to consolidate the sultan's supremacy. After the sherifs, the principal family of Mecca is the house of Shaibah, which holds the hereditary custodianship of the Ka'ba. _The Great Mosque and the Ka'ba._--Long before Mahomet the chief sanctuary of Mecca was the Ka'ba, a rude stone building without windows, and having a door 7 ft. from the ground; and so named from its resemblance to a monstrous _astragalus_ (die) of about 40 ft. cube, though the shapeless structure is not really an exact cube nor even exactly rectangular.[14] The Ka'ba has been rebuilt more than once since Mahomet purged it of idols and adopted it as the chief sanctuary of Islam, but the old form has been preserved, except in secondary details;[15] so that the "Ancient House," as it is titled, is still essentially a heathen temple, adapted to the worship of Islam by the clumsy fiction that it was built by Abraham and Ishmael by divine revelation as a temple of pure monotheism, and that it was only temporarily perverted to idol worship from the time when 'Amr ibn Lohai introduced the statue of Hobal from Syria[16] till the victory of Islam. This fiction has involved the superinduction of a new mythology over the old heathen ritual, which remains practically unchanged. Thus the chief object of veneration is the black stone, which is fixed in the external angle facing Safa. The building is not exactly oriented, but it may be called the south-east corner. Its technical name is the black corner, the others being named the Yemen (south-west), Syrian (north-west), and Irak (north-east) corners, from the lands to which they approximately point. The black stone is a small dark mass a span long, with an aspect