“Wallah, Effendi!

Thou hast escaped well!

Some men have left their skins behind.[FN#25]”

[p.211] All pilgrims do not enter the Ka’abah[FN#26]; and many refuse to do so for religious reasons. Omar Effendi, for instance, who never missed a pilgrimage, had never seen the interior.[FN#27] Those who tread the hallowed floor are bound, among many other things, never again to walk barefooted, to take up fire with the fingers, or to tell lies. Most really conscientious men cannot afford the luxuries of slippers, tongs, and truth. So thought Thomas, when offered the apple which would give him the tongue which cannot lie:—

“‘My tongue is mine ain,’ true Thomas said. ‘A gudely gift ye wad gie to me! I neither dought to buy nor sell At fair or tryst, where I may be, I dought neither speak to prince or peer, Nor ask of grace from fair ladye!’”

Amongst the Hindus I have met with men who have proceeded upon a pilgrimage to Dwarka, and yet who would not receive the brand of the god, because lying would then be forbidden to them. A confidential servant of a friend in Bombay naïvely declared that he had not been marked, as the act would have ruined him. There is a sad truth in what he said: Lying to the Oriental is meat and drink, and the roof that shelters him.

The Ka’abah had been dressed in her new attire when we entered.[FN#28] The covering, however, instead of being

[p.212] secured at the bottom to the metal rings in the basement, was tucked up by ropes from the roof, and depended over each face in two long tongues.

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