By this time Mohammed had come to be regarded as a highly desirable catch by every widow in Medina, while attractive women came from all the corners of Arabia to offer themselves to the impressionable man. His inordinate masculinity prompted the other Moslems to justify his excess of brides on the judicious ground that his “Excellency had the power of thirty strong men given him”--a consideration that was esteemed by certain discriminating traditionalists to be a proof of what has been characterized as the Prophet’s “divinely conferred preëminence.” In short, he was every inch a man. His spare, well-moulded figure was tall and commanding; he walked so fast that his gait has been compared to that of a man ascending a hill, or of one “wrenching his foot from a stone,” and this rapid locomotion made him unconsciously bend his back until in his last years he became round-shouldered. “That blessed prince’s head was large,” we are told, “and yet he was not big-headed.” His face was lean and rosy, his skin was clear and “soft as woman’s,” his slightly Roman nose was thin and shapely--some people “might regard his nasal bone as exceedingly long, though in reality it was not so”--his neck, on the unimpeachable authority of Ali, was “like that of a silver urn,” and “his blessed mouth was open, but exceedingly graceful.” The quality and abundance of his ebon hair has been explained in great detail. Thick and curly masses of it--“not very frizzled or very dangling but just right”--hung about his ears; his vast expanse of beard presumably concealed from vulgar eyes an otherwise conspicuous peculiarity: “from his chest down to the navel there was drawn a thin line of hair, while the other parts of the chest and stomach were hairless, although there was hair on his blessed arms and shoulders and the upper part of his chest.” Even in his slumbers he retained his appearance of ease and grace, for he “lay on his right side, putting the palm of his right hand under his right cheek.” An admirer summed up his manly comeliness in this poetic outburst: “I saw him at full moon, and he was brighter and more beautiful than she,” and another charming tradition affirms that no fly ever alighted on his body. Yet the handsome man was not flawless. The penetrating eyes, fringed with long and lustrous lashes, were red-lidded and bloodshot; ugly gaps disfigured his dazzling white teeth; and on his back was a birthmark which, though held to be the divine “seal of prophecy” that distinguished him as the last of the authentic prophets, was probably a large mole.