Next in order as we travel is the Hejaz, where Islam started on its mission to harry exotic creeds and nations, until its conquering progress was checked decisively by reinvigorated Christendom. In missionary parlance, Arabia generally is referred to as "a Gibraltar of fanaticism and pride which shuts out the messenger of Christ," and it must be admitted that the Hejaz has hitherto justified this description to a certain extent. Even at Jeddah Christians were only just tolerated before the War, and I found it advisable, when exploring its tortuous bazars, to wear a tarboosh, which earned me the respectful salutations then accorded to a Turk. The indigenous townsfolk of Jeddah are the "meanest" set of Moslems I have ever met--I use the epithet in its American sense, as indicating a blend of currishness and crabbedness. They cringed to the Turk when the braver Arabs of the south were hammering the oppressor in Asir and Yamen, but, like pariahs, were ready to fall on them and their women and children when they had surrendered after a gallant struggle, overwhelmed by an intensive bombardment from the sea. The alien Moslems resident in Jeddah--especially the Indians--are not a bad lot, but there is an atmosphere of intolerance brooding over the whole place which even affects Jeddah harbour. I remember being shipmate in 1913 with some eight hundred pilgrims from Aden and the southern ports of the Red Sea. As we were discharging them off Jeddah, a plump and respectable Aden merchant whom I knew by sight, but who did not know me in the guise I then wore, was gazing in rapt enthusiasm at sun-scorched Jeddah, which, against the sterile country beyond, looked like a stale bride-cake on a dust heap. "A sacred land," he crooned. "A blessed land where pigs and Christians cannot live." Incidentally he made a very good living out of Christians and was actually carrying his gear in a pigskin valise. At the same time, it is absurd for missionaries to aver of Christians at Jeddah that "even those who die in the city are buried on an island at sea." The Christian cemetery lies to the south of the town (we had to dislodge the Turks from it with shrapnel during the fighting), and the only island is a small coral reef just big enough to support the ruins of a nondescript tenement once used for quarantine. No one could be buried there without the aid of dynamite and a cold chisel. Presumably missionary report has confused Jeddah with the smaller pilgrim-port of Yenbo, where there are an island and a sandy spit with a Sheikh's tomb and a select burial-ground for certain privileged Moslems of the holy man's family. The worst indictment of Jeddah (and Mecca too, for that matter) is made by the pilgrims themselves, though some of it may be exaggerated by men smarting under the extortions of pilgrim-brokers.