The Tomb Itself He Left Untouched; And, For Once, Gave Way To The National Feelings Of The Arabians, And Perhaps To The Compunctions Of His Own Conscience, Which Could Not Entirely Divest Itself Of Earlier Impressions; He Neither Removed The Brocade From The Tomb, Nor The Curtain Which Encloses It.

Dreams, it is said, terrified him, or withheld his sacrilegious hand; and he in like manner respected that of Fatme:

But, on the other hand, he ruined, without exception, all the buildings of the public burial-ground, where many great saints repose, and destroyed even the sculptured and ornamented stones of those tombs, a simple block being thought by him quite sufficient to cover the remains of the dead.

In prohibiting any visit to the tomb, the Wahabys never entertained the idea of discontinuing the visit to the mosque. That edifice having been built by the Prophet, at the remarkable epoch of his flight from Mekka, which laid the first foundations of Islam, it is considered by them as the most holy spot upon earth, next to the Beitullah of Mekka. Saoud had indeed once given orders, that none of these Turkish pilgrims, who still flocked from Yembo to this tomb, even after the interruption of the regular pilgrim-caravans, should any more be permitted to enter Medina: and this he did to prevent what he called their idolatrous praying; a practice which it was impossible to abolish without excluding them at once from the mosque; this prohibition Saoud did not think proper to enforce:

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