of a meal he would contort himself, disgorge a new injunction, and then calmly finish his dinner. Nor does the case for the prosecution end here. The manner in which his early disciples were won and organized suggests that like principles were employed. In the beginning, Islam was a profoundly secret society, whose leader frowned upon publicity but encouraged furtive proselytizing on a great scale--a policy of action that turned out to be perfectly suited to the situation. For this privacy doubtless saved the cause from early obliteration, while at the same time it offered the romantic attraction of a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence to those who accepted Islam--a circumstance decidedly favorable to the growth of any surreptitious conclave; and, in addition, it gave Mohammed time to pick and choose his lieutenants with care, as well as to school himself in the lessons needed for ruling heterogeneous masses of men. While all this was going on, he himself remained aloof in august, inaccessible grandeur, for none could see him who was not already rabid with desire to prostrate himself at the Prophet’s feet. Thus, in those clandestine gatherings held in the house of the convert Al-Arkam--a house afterward appropriately immortalized by the title “The House of Islam”--and in the febrile activity of Mohammed’s plastic pupils, headed by the efficient Abu Bekr, is to be found the germ whence all Islam sprang. This reasoning sounds very plausible until one reflects: after all, could it have been as simple as this? And then an inscrutable image looms in the mind--the grotesque, grand, preposterous and prodigious figure of Mohammed. II