Some Of The Traditions Connected With It Are Truly Absurd.
“When Allah,” Says Ali, “Made Covenant With The Sons Of Adam On The Day Of
Fealty, He Placed The Paper Inside The Stone”; It Will, Therefore, Appear
At The Judgment, And Bear Witness To All Who Have Touched It.
Moslems
agree that it was originally white, and became black by reason of men’s
sins.
It appeared to me a common aerolite covered with a thick slaggy
coating, glossy and pitch-like, worn and polished. Dr. Wilson, of
Bombay, showed me a specimen in his possession, which externally
appeared to be a black slag, with the inside of a bright and sparkling
greyish-white, the result of admixture of nickel [p.301] with the iron.
This might possibly, as the learned Orientalist then suggested, account
for the mythic change of colour, its appearance on earth after a
thunderstorm, and its being originally a material part of the heavens.
Kutb al-Din expressly declares that, when the Karamitah restored it
after twenty-two years to the Meccans, men kissed it and rubbed it upon
their brows; and remarked that the blackness was only superficial, the
inside being white. Some Greek philosophers, it will be remembered,
believed the heavens to be composed of stones (Cosmos, “Shooting Stars”):
and Sanconiathon, ascribing the aerolite-worship to the god Cœlus,
declares them to be living or animated stones. “The Arabians,” says Maximus
of Tyre (Dissert. 38, p. 455), “pay homage to I know not what god, which
they represent by a quadrangular stone.” The gross fetichism of the
Hindus, it is well known, introduced them to litholatry.
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