Khadijah bint Khuaild, a rich and noble widow, at the head of a thriving enterprise of this kind, hearing that everybody was unanimous in extolling Mohammad's well-merited reputation for prudence and probity, thought it would be well to entrust him with the direction of her commerce. She sent for him and, as a beginning, proposed that he should take charge of a caravan she was despatching to Syria and offered a salary twice as large as she was generally in the habit of paying. Mohammad accepted; but Abu Talib, calling to mind what the monk Bahira had told him, grew uneasy when the camels were ready to start. He spoke privately to each of the caravaneers, urging them to watch over his nephew, and making them responsible for any harm that might come to him. It was with Maisarah, a slave, Khadijah's right-hand man, that Abu Talib was most solemn in his warnings. About to travel with Mohammad, Maisarah, a good servant, simple-minded and devoted, already greatly impressed by the confidential observations of such a prominent citizen as Abu Talib, fell under the sway of the charm and influence exercised by his young master over all who approached him. Maisarah felt great liking and boundless admiration for Mohammad. In every incident of the journey, Maisarah noted miraculous tokens, proving the superhuman disposition of the man he served, and indeed, certain events showed that the slave guessed aright. The road he had so often travelled, knowing all its fatigue and danger; the interminable tracks where the inexorable orb of day dried up the water-skins and gave the mortals who went that way a foretaste of the flames of Jahannam; the paths marked out by the bones of men and animals that had succumbed to pitiless thirst, were passed as easily as if they had been enchanted. Every day, at the hour when the sun, rising high over the heads of the travellers, threatened them with its deadly, blazing rays, light clouds, like the feathers of a bird, floated in the azure sky. They increased and met; then they were stretched out in long lines resembling the beam-feathers of enormous wings, opened to protect Mohammad beneath their shade. When the sun, losing its formidable power, began to sink gradually below the horizon, the feathers of these clouds dropped away one by one, vanishing in the last golden rays that the incandescent orb threw out through space before disappearing. The protecting wings, now useless, closed, making room for the stars which sparkle nowhere in the world so brilliantly as over deserts. Even the camels seemed overjoyed; they doubled the stride of their great long legs and the path seems to fold itself backwards as they advance. No dead body of any of them was added to the sinister skeletons left behind by previous caravans.