It Will Give
The Reader A Fair Idea Of The Main Point, Though, In Certain Minor
Details, It Is Not To Be Trusted.
Some of my papers and sketches, which
by precaution I had placed among my medicines, after cutting them into
squares, numbering them, and rolling them carefully up, were damaged by
the breaking of a bottle.
The plan of Al-Madinah is slightly altered
from Burckhardt's. Nothing can be more ludicrous than the views of the
Holy City, as printed in our popular works. They are of the style
"bird's-eye," and present a curious perspective. They despise distance
like the Chinese,-pictorially audacious; the Harrah, or ridge in the
foreground appears to be 200 yards, instead of three or four miles,
distant from the town. They strip the place of its suburb Al-Manakhah,
in order to show the enceinte, omit the fort, and the gardens north and
south of the city, enlarge the Mosque twenty-fold for dignity, and make
it occupy the whole centre of the city, instead of a small corner in
the south-east quarter. They place, for symmetry, towers only at the
angles of the walls, instead of all along the curtain, and gather up
and press into the same field all the venerable and interesting
features of the country, those behind the artist's back, and at his
sides, as well as what appears in front. Such are the Turkish
lithographs. At Meccah, some Indians support themselves by depicting
the holy shrines; their works are a truly Oriental mixture of ground
plan and elevation, drawn with pen and ink, and brightened with the
most vivid colours-grotesque enough, but less unintelligible than the
more ambitious imitations of European art.
[p.343]CHAPTER XVII.
AN ESSAY TOWARDS THE HISTORY OF THE PROPHET'S
MOSQUE.
IBN ABBAS has informed the world that when the eighty individuals
composing Noah's family issued from the ark, they settled at a place
distant ten marches and twelve parasangs[FN#1] (thirty-six to
forty-eight miles) from Babel or Babylon. There they increased and
multiplied, and spread into a mighty empire. At length under the rule
of Namrud (Nimrod), son of Kanaan (Canaan), son of Ham, they lapsed
from the worship of the true God: a miracle dispersed them into distant
parts of the earth, and they were further broken up by the one
primaeval language being divided into seventy-two dialects.
A tribe called Aulad Sam bin Nuh (the children of Shem), or Amalikah
and Amalik,[FN#2] from their ancestor Amlak bin Arfakhshad bin Sam bin
Nuh, was inspired
[p.344]with a knowledge of the Arabic tongue[FN#3]: it settled at
Al-Madinah, and was the first to cultivate the ground and to plant
palm-trees. In course of time these people extended over the whole
tract between the seas of Al-Hijaz (the Red Sea) and Al-Oman,
(north-western part of the Indian Ocean), and they became the
progenitors of the Jababirah[FN#4] (tyrants or "giants") of Syria, as
well as the Farainah (Pharaohs) of Egypt.[FN#5] Under these Amalik such
[p.345]was the age of man that during the space of four hundred years a
bier would not be seen, nor "keening" be heard, in their cities.
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