But with Mohammed’s acolytes the case has been wholly different. For from the beginning they believed in the Koran with an appallingly artless simplicity, at once noble and absurd. Through its instrumentality, Allah the Wise, the Only Wise, revealed his immutable decrees: to the good, the rewards of a Paradise that utterly beggared the Christian Heaven, and to the bad the punishments of a Hell that contained an infinity of such refined tortures of heat, and even of cold, as neither the most imaginatively gifted Jew nor Christian had yet conceived--for Dante was undreamed of. Mohammed of course properly approved of Allah’s decisions and judgments, as an employee should rightly behave toward his employer; and he was especially fond of his superior’s delight in describing Hell--“I swear,” he gravely announced one day, “that it is one of the most serious things.” The earlier part of the Koran, or “Recitation,” is mostly concerned with these elemental and primitive things; only at a later day did Allah--or Mohammed?--deal separately with the many matters touching the growth of a definite code of religious, social and governmental precepts. When scoffers poked ridicule at the rather sloppy grammar and metre of the Koran, Mohammed did two things: in the first place, after brandishing the doom of an eternity of roaring flames over their heads, he challenged them to produce better verses than his--or Allah’s?--own; and, in the second place, he incautiously prepared a loophole of escape by revealing, in Sura 69, the fact that the Koran was “not the word of a poet,” but “a revelation from the Lord of the Worlds.” This lofty gesture temporarily squelched his defamers, who promptly dug off with their tails between their legs; but its effect did not last long when they reflected how damaging an admission he had made. It may of course be readily granted that precepts concerned with daily washing, food, taxes, and so on, were not especially well adapted to rhythmical prose; but, after all, that was Allah’s and Mohammed’s lookout. Perhaps, indeed, the confession of non-poetical power was scarcely necessary; for the inexplicable man who, in the pristine freshness of poetic glow, could indite this terse stanza, instinct with brooding doom: “In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men, The King of men, The God of men, From the evil of the whisperings of the slinking devil, Who whispers into the hearts of men, From among the Jinn and the men,” and who conceived the charming fantasy that the lengthened shadows of morning and evening are elongated in obeisance to Allah, was also capable many years later of concocting an effusion designed expressly to make his wives behave themselves. [Illustration: IV] “A PROPHET IS NOT WITHOUT HONOR” I