and so on, until the end. “Thou art God’s Prophet, and I am Gabriel,” announced the awe-inspiring guest before he departed to receive the blessing of Allah for having so successfully executed the heavenly command. Gabriel, in truth, was a very valuable ambassador, for, through the to and fro journeyings of this indefatigable messenger, Allah was able to remain at ease in Heaven, thus keeping up that appearance of intangible, majestic remoteness so necessary for dignified gods. And thus Mohammed came into his own. From that moment he looked upon himself as Allah’s vicegerent, through whom Allah’s incontestable decrees were to be given to man--although Gabriel, or the Holy Ghost (for Mohammed’s slipshod knowledge of Christian theogony led him into the regrettable error of perpetually confusing those two eminent divinities), continued in his capacity as interpreter of the intermittently revealed series of tablets. And so careful was Allah to eliminate the possibility of merely human invention that He prefaced every Sura, or individual revelation, with the express or implied injunction “SAY” or “SPEAK”--the irrefutable proof of divine authorship. Mohammed’s every doubt had now vanished, his soul was completely at ease; and from his lips there burst the wildly exultant chant: “_La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammed rasul Allah!_” Such, we may believe if we so desire, was the origin of the Koran, of Mohammed the Prophet, and of Islam itself--those three interacting and inseparable forces (a sort of Pagan Trinity, in fact) which, emerging when Rome was dying and Christianity was barely out of its cradle, convulsed the civilized and uncivilized world for centuries to come. Inasmuch, however, as Mohammed himself, not to mention his commentators, has added certain clarifying details that were touched with an earthiness foreign to the pretty picture, it may not be wholly presumptuous or irreverent to glance briefly at the other side of the canvas.