[FN#19] For North-East read South-East. [FN#20] I will not enter into the fabulous origin of the Hajar al-Aswad. Some of the traditions connected with it are truly absurd. “When Allah,” says Ali, “made covenant with the Sons of Adam on the Day of Fealty, he placed the paper inside the stone”; it will, therefore, appear at the judgment, and bear witness to all who have touched it. Moslems agree that it was originally white, and became black by reason of men’s sins. It appeared to me a common aerolite covered with a thick slaggy coating, glossy and pitch-like, worn and polished. Dr. Wilson, of Bombay, showed me a specimen in his possession, which externally appeared to be a black slag, with the inside of a bright and sparkling greyish-white, the result of admixture of nickel [p.301] with the iron. This might possibly, as the learned Orientalist then suggested, account for the mythic change of colour, its appearance on earth after a thunderstorm, and its being originally a material part of the heavens. Kutb al-Din expressly declares that, when the Karamitah restored it after twenty-two years to the Meccans, men kissed it and rubbed it upon their brows; and remarked that the blackness was only superficial, the inside being white. Some Greek philosophers, it will be remembered, believed the heavens to be composed of stones (Cosmos, “Shooting Stars”): and Sanconiathon, ascribing the aerolite-worship to the god Cœlus, declares them to be living or animated stones. “The Arabians,” says Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. 38, p. 455), “pay homage to I know not what god, which they represent by a quadrangular stone.” The gross fetichism of the Hindus, it is well known, introduced them to litholatry. At Jagannath they worship a pyramidal black stone, fabled to have fallen from heaven, or miraculously to have presented itself on the place where the temple now stands. Moreover, they revere the Salagram, as the emblem of Vishnu, the second person in their triad. The rudest emblem of the “Bonus Deus” was a round stone. It was succeeded in India by the cone and triangle; in Egypt by the pyramid; in Greece it was represented by cones of terra-cotta about three inches and a half long. Without going deep into theory, it may be said that the Ka’abah and the Hajar are the only two idols which have survived the 360 composing the heavenly host of the Arab pantheon. Thus the Hindu poet exclaims:— “Behold the marvels of my idol-temple, O Moslem! That when its idols are destroy’d, it becomes Allah’s House.”