The Meccan boy Mohammed, who had been Burton’s companion during the pilgrimage, conducted the latter to his mother’s house, where he remained during his stay. A meal of vermicelli and sugar was prepared on their arrival in the night, and after an hour or two of sleep they rose at dawn, in order to perform the ceremonies of arrival. After having bathed, they walked in their pilgrim garb to the _Beit Allah_, or “House of God.” “There,” says Burton, “there at last it lay, the bourne of my long and weary pilgrimage, realizing the plans and hopes of many and many a year. The mirage medium of fancy invested the huge catafalque and its gloomy pall with peculiar charms. There were no giant fragments of hoar antiquity as in Egypt, no remains of graceful and harmonious beauty as in Greece and Italy, no barbaric gorgeousness as in the buildings of India; yet the view was strange, unique, and how few have looked upon the celebrated shrine! I may truly say, that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did the Hadji from the far north. It was as if the poetical legends of the Arab spoke truth, and that the waving wings of angels, not the sweet breezes of morning, were agitating and swelling the black covering of the shrine. But, to confess humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.” Burton’s description of the Beit Allah and the Kaaba is more minute and careful than that of Burckhardt, but does not differ from it in any important particular. Neither is it necessary to quote his account of the ceremonies to be performed by each individual pilgrim, with all their mechanical prostrations and repetitions. His account of the visit to the famous Black Stone, however, is both curious and amusing: “For a long time I stood looking in despair at the swarming crowd of Bedouin and other pilgrims that besieged it. But the boy Mohammed was equal to the occasion. During our circuit he had displayed a fiery zeal against heresy and schism by foully abusing every Persian in his path, and the inopportune introduction of hard words into his prayers made the latter a strange patchwork. He might, for instance, be repeating ‘and I take refuge with thee from ignominy in this world,’ when, ‘O thou rejected one, son of the rejected!’ would be the interpolation addressed to some long-bearded Khorassani, ‘and in that to come—O hog and brother of a hoggess!’ And so he continued till I wondered that no one dared to turn and rend him. After vainly addressing the pilgrims, of whom nothing could be seen but a mosaic of occiputs and shoulder-blades, the boy Mohammed collected about half a dozen stalwart Meccans, with whose assistance, by sheer strength, we wedged our way into the thin and light-legged crowd. The Bedouins turned round upon us like wildcats, but they had no daggers.