The statistics of the pilgrimage cannot be given with certainty and vary much from year to year. The quarantine office keeps a record of arrivals by sea at Jidda (66,000 for 1904); but to these must be added those travelling by land from Cairo, Damascus and Irak, the pilgrims who reach Medina from Yanbu and go on to Mecca, and those from all parts of the peninsula. Burckhardt in 1814 estimated the crowd at Arafa at 70,000, Burton in 1853 at 50,000, 'Abd el-Razzak in 1858 at 60,000. This great assemblage is always a dangerous centre of infection, and the days of Mina especially, spent under circumstances originally adapted only for a Bedouin fair, with no provisions for proper cleanliness, and with the air full of the smell of putrefying offal and flesh drying in the sun, produce much sickness. LITERATURE.--Besides the Arabic geographers and cosmographers, we have Ibn 'Abd Rabbih's description of the mosque, early in the 10th century (_'Ikd Farid_, Cairo ed., iii. 362 sqq.), but above all the admirable record of Ibn Jubair (A.D. 1184), by far the best account extant of Mecca and the pilgrimage. It has been much pillaged by Ibn Batuta. The Arabic historians are largely occupied with fabulous matter as to Mecca before Islam; for these legends the reader may refer to C. de Perceval's _Essai_. How little confidence can be placed in the pre-Islamic history appears very clearly from the distorted accounts of Abraha's excursion against the Hejaz, which fell but a few years before the birth of the Prophet, and is the first event in Meccan history which has confirmation from other sources. See Nöldeke's version of Tabari, p. 204 sqq. For the period of the Prophet, Ibn Hisham and Wakidi are valuable sources in topography as well as history. Of the special histories and descriptions of Mecca published by Wüstenfeld (_Chroniken der Stadt Mekka_, 3 vols., 1857-1859, with an abstract in German, 1861), the most valuable is that of Azraqi. It has passed through the hands of several editors, but the oldest part goes back to the beginning of the 9th Christian century. Kutbeddin's history (vol. iii. of the _Chroniken_) goes down with the additions of his nephew to A.D. 1592.