This, As Well As The
Dome, Is Called Al-Surrah, Or The Navel.
The cicerone directed me to
kiss this manner of hieroglyph, which I did, thinking the while, that,
under the circumstances, the salutation was quite uncalled-for.
Having
prayed here, and at the head, where a few young trees grow, we walked
along the side of the two parallel dwarf walls which define the
outlines of the body: they are about six paces apart, and between them,
upon Eve’s
[p.274] neck, are two tombs, occupied, I was told, by Osman Pasha and
his son, who repaired the Mother’s sepulchre. I could not help remarking
to the boy Mohammed, that if our first parent measured a hundred and
twenty paces from head to waist, and eighty from waist to heel, she
must have presented much the appearance of a duck. To this the youth
replied, flippantly, that he thanked his stars the Mother was
underground, otherwise that men would lose their senses with fright.
Ibn Jubayr (twelfth century) mentions only an old dome, “built upon the
place where Eve stopped on the way to Meccah.” Yet Al-Idrisi (A.D. 1154)
declares Eve’s grave to be at Jeddah. Abd al-Karim (1742) compares it to
a parterre, with a little dome in the centre, and the extremities
ending in barriers of palisades; the circumference was a hundred and
ninety of his steps. In Rooke’s Travels we are told that the tomb is
twenty feet long. Ali Bey, who twice visited Jeddah, makes no allusion
to it; we may therefore conclude that it had been destroyed by the
Wahhabis. Burckhardt, who, I need
[p.275] scarcely say, has been carefully copied by our popular authors,
was informed that it was a “rude structure of stone, about four feet in
length, two or three feet in height, and as many in breadth”; thus
resembling the tomb of Noah, seen in the valley of Al-Buka’a in Syria.
Bruce writes: “Two days’ journey from this place (? Meccah or Jeddah) Eve’s
grave, of green sods, about fifty yards in length, is shown to this day”;
but the great traveller probably never issued from the town-gates. And
Sir W. Harris, who could not have visited the Holy Place, repeats, in
1840, that Eve’s grave of green sod is still shown on the barren shore of
the Red Sea.” The present structure is clearly modern; anciently, I was
told at Jeddah, the sepulchre consisted of a stone at the head, a
second at the feet, and the navel-dome.
The idol of Jeddah, in the days of Arab litholatry, was called Sakhrah
Tawilah, the Long Stone. May not this stone of Eve be the Moslemized
revival of the old idolatry? It is to be observed that the Arabs, if
the tombs be admitted as evidence, are inconsistent in their dimensions
of the patriarchal stature. The sepulchre of Adam at the Masjid
al-Khayf is, like that of Eve, gigantic.
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