The blessed, having quenched their thirst in Muhammad’s pond, are admitted into Paradise, and there they are entertained to dinner by the Supreme Host. For meat they will have the ox Balám and the fish Nún, and for bread--mark this--God will turn the whole earth into one huge loaf, and hand it to His guests, “holding it like a cake.” When the repast is over they will be conducted to the palaces prepared for them, where they will dwell with the houris they have won by their good deeds on earth. They will fare sumptuously through all eternity, and without loss of appetite, eat as much as they will: for all superfluities will be discharged by sweat as fragrant as musk, so that the last morsel of food will be as comforting as the first. The imagination of the tradition-mongers is not less extravagant when it busies itself with the holy festivals of the faith. The A’yáde-Shadir, perhaps the most important of these feast-days, falls on the eighteenth of Zú-’l-hijjah. Books might be written--nay, tomes innumerable have been filled--to do honour to the attributes of that day. In fact, Oriental exaggeration in general, and the Shiah superstition in particular, reach the climax of fancy in the description of the events that are supposed by the devout Shiah to have happened on the A’yád of Ghadir. For was it not on the eighteenth of Zú-’l-hijjah that Muhammad mounted a camel, and, raising ’Alí in his arms, appointed this chivalrous cousin and son-in-law of his to be his lawful successor? This righteous act on the part of the Prophet is the corner-stone of the Shiah faith, and so it is not unnatural, perhaps, that it should have been made the source of unnumbered traditions. We read, among other inventions, that it was on that day that God chose to humiliate Satan by ordering an angel to rub his nose in the dirt; that the Archangel Gabriel, along with a host of angels, came down from heaven in the evening, bearing a throne of light, which he placed opposite to the Ka’bah, and from which he preached to his companions a stirring sermon in praise of Islám and its Prophet; that Moses had made his will in favour of Aaron and that Jesus had selected Simon Peter to go and preach to the Jews on the same day in their own lives.