Fortune has brought me down (her wonted way) from station great and high to low estate; Fortune has rent away my plenteous store: of all my wealth, honour alone is left. Fortune has turned my joy to tears: how oft did Fortune make me laugh with what she gave! But for these girls, the Kata’s downy brood, unkindly thrust from door to door as hard, Far would I roam and wide to seek my bread in earth that has no lack of breadth and length; Nay, but our children in our midst, what else but our hearts are they walking on the ground? If but the wind blow harsh on one of them, mine eye says no to slumber all night long.[261] That the custom was deep-rooted when Mohammed arrived on the scene is evident from the fact that Ozaim the Fazarite, according to Abu Tamman, when he decided to save his daughter Lacita, had to conceal that fact from his people, although she was his only child.[262] Hunger and famine were undoubtedly the main causes of the practice of getting rid of the female children, although according to Porphyry a boy was sacrificed at Dumat-al Jandal[263] and other Arabs sacrificed a virgin annually. The cannibalistic strain is re-occurring. In the year 378 A.D. a body of Saracens attacking the Goths before Constantinople gave an example of this side of the Arabs. “Both the Goths and the Saracens were parting on equal terms,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, when “a strange and unprecedented incident gave the final advantage to the eastern warriors; for one of them with long hair, naked—with the exception of a covering around his waist,—shouting a hoarse and melancholy cry, drew his dagger and plunged into the middle of the Gothic host, and after he had slain an enemy, put his lips to his throat and sucked his blood. The barbarians [the Goths] were terrified at this marvellous prodigy and from that time forth when they proceeded on any enterprise, displayed none of their former and usual ferocity, but advanced with hesitating steps.”[264] The last line almost leads one to believe that the wily Arab might have been impelled not so much by the cannibalistic strain as by cunning and generalship. Procopius, in his account of the wars of Justinian, speaks of the far-off Saracens as anthropophagous,[265] and according to one Arabian authority at Medina they licked the blood of the man who had been killed in blood revenge. Another custom coming undoubtedly from cannibalistic times is the vow of the mother to drink wine from the skull of the slayer of her son.[266] These were the conditions that Mohammed undoubtedly ended by his preaching.