As a mountain torrent carries the rigor of grim heights through a low tropic zone, so this music moves through the Moorish Mellah with its prophetic past. For all its tides of blood and wandering, it is still. The music of Arab races like stripped steeds; that of the Moor jangles like bone, snaps like sinew. Here is a song that dwells wide over fields, tops the cedars of Lebanon, swings with the sun--and yet is but a prayer. Its immobility has voyaged. The prophets are here; and Ruth with her eyes fertile as the wheat; and Judith scabbarded in beauty. And Babylon to which, as Tangiers now, the scum of peoples rose; where magic parded with penury, coins glinted in blood. Spain is here, a perpendicular starkness rising from the low tide of the music--Spain, with her singing seers. And Araby has dropped her gold into a humble song. As in the streets where the street women sing, here is the cry--shrill, lithic: dangling but a moment on the plaint like a barbarous dart upon a mother’s breast. * * * * * Like the Jews, the Moslems are the People of a Book. The Bible is the compiled and edited remnant of a literature ranging from epigram to epic, into whose making went a thousand years. The Koran is the work of a generation, and of a man. Whatever divergence from the prophetic mouth is due to the disciples, Omar and Ali,[4] it is sure that before Mohammed there was no Koran and after him his text has changed only through processes of natural error. Before the Koran, the Arabs possessed an anthology of verse, lapidic, utterly objective: poems singing the loves and tribulations of the desert. These did not go, like the ancestral heritage of the Hebrews, into their holy book. After the Koran, this strain, celebrating passion, thirst, hospitality and war, went on. The heightened activity of the Arabs enlarged their letters. But the Koran, unlike what came after as before, is subjective. Pictures of Paradise, explicit laws, ways of the wrath of Allah, pleadings and campaigns, float in the swim of an inchoate exhortation. There is no reason to doubt that the Prophet did dictate the Koran--and revised it little. The book’s substance is an anarchic potpourri of what Mohammed must have thought out for himself, together with what he heard in synagogue and church. There is a canny set of laws: there is an endless repetition of the delights of heaven “where are the gardens under which flow waters” and of the miraculous nature of the virgins there, who are never unclean, being perpetual lovers and perpetual virgins. There is great harping on the unpleasantness of Hell. There are periodic outbursts against the Jews and much gentle reproval of the Christians whom Mohammed wooed with worshipful references to Jesus and to Mary. There is, above all, ceaseless plagiary from the Old Testament tales, whose beauty and significance are usually scrapped in Mohammed’s zest to get to his main point.