Being desirous of completing his travelling equipments before the commencement of the Hadj, Burckhardt now proceeded to Jidda, where such things are more easily procured than at Mecca, and again returned about the middle of October, with a slave-boy whom he purchased. He hired apartments in an unfrequented part of the city, where he enjoyed the advantage of several large trees growing before his windows, “the verdure of which,” says he, “among the barren and sunburnt rocks of Mecca, was to me more exhilarating than the finest landscape could have been under different circumstances.” The principal curiosity of Mecca is the Beitullah, or House of God, a species of quadrangle, in the centre of which stands the Kaaba, “an oblong massive structure, eighteen paces in length, fourteen in breadth, and from thirty-five to forty feet in height. It is constructed of the gray Mecca stone, in large blocks of different sizes, joined together in a very rough manner, and with bad cement.” “At the north-east corner of the Kaaba, near the door, is the famous ‘Black Stone;’ it forms a part of the sharp angle of the building at four or five feet above the ground. It is an irregular oval of about seven inches in diameter, with an undulating surface, composed of about a dozen smaller stones of different sizes and shapes, well joined together with a small quantity of cement, and perfectly smoothed. It looks as if the whole had been broken into many pieces by a violent blow, and then united again. It is very difficult to determine accurately the quality of this stone, which has been worn to its present surface by the millions of touches and kisses it has received. It appeared to me like a laver, containing several small extraneous particles, of a whitish and of a yellowish substance. Its colour is now a deep reddish brown, approaching to black: it is surrounded on all sides by a border, composed of a substance which I took to be a close cement of pitch and gravel, of a similar, but not quite the same, brownish colour. This border serves to support its detached pieces; it is two or three inches in breadth, and rises a little above the surface of the stone. Both the border and the stone itself are encircled by a silver band, broader below than above, and on the two sides, with a considerable swelling below, as if a part of the stone were hidden under it. The lower part of the border is studded with silver nails.”