On my soul, it was fine! All my senses must have deserted me. I must have lost all consciousness of self suddenly. The burden of existence seemed to be lifted. If I did not actually slip off the slough of the flesh I came to realise in a flash that the soul is immortal. These introspective thoughts were not mine at the moment of the transformation. They were retrospective, forced on me, when, on coming back to a sense of my surroundings, I found myself kneeling at the Door of Repentance, and heard myself crying “Labbaik, la Sherika lak Labbaik.” Yes; there was I--“an Agnostic who would like to know”--rubbing my brow on the marble floor of the Ka’bah, without the dimmest notion in my mind as to how I came to be there. Only a month before I had been sipping lemon squash in a London restaurant. Strange. The first thing I did was to look round in search of my guide, as sceptical a rascal as ever breathed. He was on his knees, at my side, his eyes starting out of the sockets. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Come,” I said, “let us go out. I’m suffocating.” He rose to his feet, looking scared and abashed; but his face assumed its usual expression of sunny mirth on reaching the Harem. He put his tongue in his cheek as of yore; then, repenting him of his unregenerate mood, he told the truth. “Yá-Moulai (Oh, sir),” said he, “within the house so great reverence fell on me that I did hardly think of the blessed hourís and perís promised to me in Paradise. The same emotion overmasters me every year on entering into the Ka’bah of Allah, and yet what does it all mean? What is the value of this dream which we call life, and which is my true self? Is it the self that inquires, scoffs, doubts, but wants to find truth? Or is it the self that you discovered a moment ago bereft of every sense save one, namely, that which would seem to have drawn me irresistibly to a power whose will none would seem able to dispute? Has that power an existence outside my emotions, or is it merely the fabric of my senses? You are silent, Yá-Moulai. Well, there are more ways of getting drunk than by drinking of the juice of the forbidden fruit. I escaped from myself just then on a spiritual rather than a spirituous fluid. Let us return to our camp.” CHAPTER VII ON THE ROAD TO ARAFAT