Briefly, He Seems To Have Been A Man Who, Under Favourable Circumstances, Learned As Little As Possible.

[P.402]APPENDIX VII.

NOTES ON MY JOURNEY.

BY A. SPRENGER.

IN the map to a former edition of the Pilgrimage, Captain Burton’s route from Madina to Meccah is wrongly laid down, owing to a typographical error of the text, “From Wady Laymun to Meccah S.E. 45°;” (see vol. ii. p. 155, ante), whereas the road runs S.W. 45°, or, as Hamdany expresses himself in the commentary on the Qacyda Rod., “Between west and south; and therefore the setting sun shines at the evening prayer (your face being turned towards Meccah) on your right temple.” The account of the eastern route from Madina to Meccah by so experienced a traveller as Captain Burton is an important contribution to our geographical knowledge of Arabia. It leads over the lower terrace of Nejd, the country which Muslim writers consider as the home of the genuine Arabs and the scene of Arabic chivalry. As by this mistake the results of my friend’s pilgrimage, which, though pious as he unquestionably is, he did not undertake from purely religious motives, have been in a great measure marred, I called in 1871 his attention to it. At the same time I submitted to him a sketch of a map in which his own and Burckhardt’s routes are protracted, and a few notes culled from Arabic geographers, with the intention of showing how much light his investigations throw on early

[p.403] geography if illustrated by a corrected map; and how they fail to fulfil this object if the mistake is not cleared up.

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