Toward the end of November the caravans from Syria and Egypt arrived, and at the same time Mohammed Ali, so that the _hadj_, or pilgrimage, assumed a character of unusual pomp and parade. The Pasha’s _ihram_ consisted of two of the finest Cashmere shawls; the horses and camels belonging to himself and his large retinue, with those of the Pasha of Damascus and other Moslem princes, were decorated with the most brilliant trappings. On arriving, the pilgrims did not halt in Mecca, but continued their march to the Sacred Mountain of Arafat, to the eastward of the city. A camp, several miles in extent, was formed upon the plain, at the foot of the mountain, and here Burckhardt joined the immense crowd, in order to take his share in the ceremonies of the following day. In the morning he climbed to the top of Arafat, which is an irregular, isolated mass of granite, rising only about two hundred feet above the plain. Overlooking thus the entire camp, he counted more than three thousand tents, and estimated that at least twenty-five thousand camels and seventy thousand human beings were there collected together. “The scene,” he says, “was one of the most extraordinary which the earth affords. Every pilgrim issued from his tent to walk over the plain and take a view of the busy crowds assembled there. Long streets of tents, fitted up as bazaars, furnished them with all kinds of provisions. The Syrian and Egyptian cavalry were exercised by their chiefs early in the morning, while thousands of camels were seen feeding upon the dry shrubs of the plain all around the camp. The Syrian pilgrims were encamped upon the south and southwest sides of the mountain; the Egyptians upon the southeast. Mohammed Ali, and Soleyman, Pasha of Damascus, as well as several of their followers, had very handsome tents; but the most magnificent of all was that of the wife of Mohammed Ali, the mother of Toossoon Pasha and Ibrahim Pasha, who had lately arrived from Cairo with a truly royal equipage, five hundred camels being necessary to transport her baggage from Jedda to Mecca. Her tent was in fact an encampment, consisting of a dozen tents of different sizes, inhabited by her women; the whole enclosed by a wall of linen cloth, eight hundred paces in circuit, the single entrance to which was guarded by eunuchs in splendid dresses. The beautiful embroidery on the exterior of this linen palace, with the various colors displayed in every part of it, constituted an object which reminded me of some descriptions in the Arabian tales of the Thousand and One Nights.”