Kinana’s notoriously beautiful wife, the seventeen-year-old Safiya, and her companion were then fetched up to the Prophet; the companion, seeing the headless trunk, beat her face and howled aloud. “Take that she-devil hence!” snapped Mohammed; but he tenderly folded his mantle around Safiya’s head to screen her from the sight, for he had determined to marry her. His approaching nuptials, however, were nearly ruined by Zeinab, a Jewess who had lost all her male relatives and her husband on that fateful day. She poisoned a kid, tastily garnished it, and then placed it before him, smiling and coaxing him to eat. Having distributed the least desirable parts among his fellows, he bit off a choice mouthful from the shoulder; but barely had his teeth closed on it when he cried, “Hold! surely this shoulder hath been poisoned,” and indecorously spat it out. One man who had partaken of the meat died, and Mohammed himself is reputed to have been afflicted with such violent pains that he was repeatedly cupped between the shoulders; yet within a short time he was observed to disappear with the fickle-hearted and coyly reluctant Safiya behind the bridal tent. Thus the former Meccan merchant and exile passed from conquest to conquest. He was now not only a prophet--plenty of contemporary men professed a similarly exclusive claim to that commonplace title--but the recognized dictator over Medina and an extensive range of contingent territory; furthermore, the terror inspired by the mere mention of his name had penetrated to the most distant stretches of Arabia, and was beginning to arouse sinister forebodings in adjacent nations. Had his relatively unbroken succession of victories made him an inexorably ruthless tyrant whose actions were wholly prompted by an insatiable ambition, or had they but reaffirmed his ceaselessly reiterated claim that he was only plastic clay in Allah’s hand? Did he delight to glut himself in wanton bloodshed, or, in the inmost regions of his spirit, did he believe that the punishments meted out upon his enemies had actually been self-inflicted inasmuch as they had refused to accept the one true God? “And He hath caused to descend from their strongholds the Jews.... And He struck terror into their hearts. A part ye slaughtered, and a part ye took into captivity. And He hath made you to inherit their land, and their habitations, and their wealth, and a land which ye had not trodden upon; and God is over all things powerful.... I am the strongest, therefore Allah is with me.” Did those exultant words emanate from a profligate, coldly calculating and atrociously barbarous hypocrite, or from a humble and grateful penitent whose sole wish was to be a channel through which Allah’s divine purposes might be made manifest? The answer forever bides. [Illustration: VIII] AVOCATIONS I