It came about thus. Toward the end of 569, Abd Al-Muttalib had betrothed Abdallah to a Meccan maiden named Amina; and at the same time, even though he was over seventy and Allah had abundantly granted his youthful plea for potency, he himself had married a radiantly youthful cousin of Amina’s. Some months later Mecca was invaded by an army under Abraha, a Christian warrior from Abyssinia, who brought an elephant in his train--a prodigy that so astounded the simple Arabs that the year of the invasion was ever after called “the Elephant.” He had come, he said, merely to destroy the impious Kaba, and he had no desire to shed any man’s blood; but inasmuch as the Meccans knew that Christian Abraha’s fervor had already manifested itself in the plunder of hundreds of camels, they were rightly sceptical of any promise whatever on his part. Overtures of peace were unsuccessful, for on no account would the wealthy Koreish agree to permit the demolition of their most remunerative mercantile house, and preparations were accordingly made to offer some feeble resistance to the invader. Then Abd Al-Muttalib bethought himself of a possible means to thwart the impending peril. Leaning on the door of the Kaba, he prayed aloud thus: “Defend, O Lord, thine own house, and suffer not the Cross to triumph over the Kaba!” He then made haste to join the other refugees, who had betaken themselves to the neighboring crags to watch whatever might betide. Sharp-eared Allah, aloof in his own particular Heaven, heard the prayer and promptly answered it by inflicting a pestilential disease upon the raiding Christian hosts. Overwhelmed by the disaster, they began a confused retreat: hundreds of them died by the wayside, and Abraha himself, covered with a mass of poisonous and putrid ulcers, soon expired in terrible agony. Thus was the Kaba gloriously saved and the Cross ignominiously overthrown--an event so prophetical of coming centuries that its portentous symbolism demanded an incarnate manifestation. The routed Christian warriors had barely left the shores of Arabia when Amina gave birth to a son. II