‘He lived with his wives in a row of humble cottages, separated from one another by palm-branches, cemented together with mud. He would kindle the fire, sweep the floor, and milk the goats himself. ´Áïsheh tells us that he slept upon a leathern mat, and that he mended his clothes, and even clouted his shoes, with his own hand. For months together ... he did not get a sufficient meal. The little food that he had was always shared with those who dropped in to partake of it. Indeed, outside the Prophet’s house was a bench or gallery, on which were always to be found a number of the poor, who lived entirely on his generosity, and were hence called the “people of the bench.” His ordinary food was dates and water or barley-bread; milk and honey were luxuries of which he was fond, but which he rarely allowed himself. The fare of the desert seemed most congenial to him, even when he was sovereign of Arabia.’ [13] Moḥammad was full forty before he felt himself called to be an apostle to his people. If he did not actually worship the local deities of the place, at least he made no public protest against the fetish worship of the Ḳureysh. Yet in the several phases of his life, in his contact with traders, in his association with Zeyd and other men, he had gained an insight into better things than idols and human sacrifices, divining-arrows and mountains and stars. He had heard a dim echo of some ‘religion of Abraham;’ he had listened to the stories of the Haggadah: he knew a very little about Jesus of Nazareth. He seems to have suffered long under the burden of doubt and self-distrust. He used to wander about the hills alone, brooding over these things; he shunned the society of men, and ‘solitude became a passion to him.’ At length came the crisis. He was spending the sacred months on Mount Ḥirá, ‘a huge barren rock, torn by cleft and hollow ravine, standing out solitary in the full white glare of the desert sun, shadowless, flowerless, without well or rill.’ Here in a cave Moḥammad gave himself up to prayer and fasting. Long months or even years of doubt had increased his nervous excitable disposition. He had had, they say, cataleptic fits during his childhood, and was evidently more delicately and finely constituted than those around him. Given this nervous nature, and the grim solitude of the hill where he had almost lived for long weary months, blindly feeling after some truth upon which to rest his soul, it is not difficult to believe the tradition of the cave, that Moḥammad heard a voice say, ‘Cry!’ ‘What shall I cry?’ he answers—the question that has been burning his heart during all his mental struggles— Cry[14]! in the name of thy Lord, who hath created; He hath created man from a clot of blood. Cry! and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful, Who hath taught [writing] by the pen: He hath taught man that which he knew not.