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Niv Christian Growth Study Bible
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 Niv Christian Growth
Study Bible Softcover

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.
 The Black Stone at Mecca

It is necessary for every Moslem to visit Mecca at least once

during his lifetime. When all these pilgrims arrive within a short
distance of the Holy City, they must put off their every-day clothing
and put on the pilgrim garb, which consists of two pieces of white
cloth,—one tied around the loins and the other drawn over the
shoulders, under their arm, leaving one shoulder bare. The pilgrims
are allowed to wear sandals, but not shoes. Thus clad every one
goes in turn to the sacred well of Zem Zem, washes his whole body
with a pailful of the water, and then drinks as much as he cares.
Then he enters the “door of peace” and kisses the most wonderful
stone in the world, running around the Kaaba seven times and each
time when he passes the stone he strokes it with his hand or kisses
it. After this all the Moslem pilgrims say the regular prayer and
retire.
The next day, those who are seeking Paradise along the zigzag
road of Mohammed’s religion must do other things as well. They
must visit the place where Abraham is supposed to have stood,
when he rebuilt the Kaaba. Then they must run between the
mountains of Safa and Milra, two little hills near Mecca, and do other
things every day until the sixth day, when all the pilgrims surround
the Kaaba as they did on the first day. On the seventh day the
sermon is preached from the great pulpit in the middle of the
building. The preacher no doubt urges all those who are present to
persevere in their religion and make converts among the nations. It
is a large gathering indeed which comes to Mecca. Between seventy
and eighty thousand people travel every year to visit the city from
every part of the Moslem world,—Europe, Asia, Africa and the
islands of the sea. After the sermon is over two more days are spent
in various visits to sacred places around Mecca and then comes the
greatest day of all, which is celebrated all over the Moslem world,
namely, the day of Sacrifice.
Although Mohammedans deny the death of Christ and the need of
an atonement for sin, it is strange that this great feast should still be
a feast of sacrifice, like that of the Jews of old. Every earnest
believer takes a goat, a sheep or a camel, places it so as to face the
Kaaba and plunges a knife into its throat as he cries out—“God is
great and Mohammed is His apostle.” When the sacrifice is over the
pilgrim is allowed again to shave his beard and trim his nails and put
on his ordinary clothing, all of which was forbidden during the ten
days of pilgrimage. He is also given a certificate stating that he has
finished the pilgrimage and is now ready for Paradise, or words to
that effect.
The most of the pilgrims who come back from Mecca are not any
better for going, because the city is the centre not only of diseases
such as cholera and plague, which cause the death of many, but is
also the centre of immorality and wickedness.
Although travellers have visited Mecca by pretending to be
Mohammedans and at the risk of their lives, no Christian, were he
known to be so, would be allowed to enter the sacred city. The first
European to visit Mecca was an English sailor boy, called Joseph
Pitts, who was captured as a slave in Algiers and taken to Mecca
against his will. He was forced to become a Moslem, but afterwards
escaped to England and wrote a book on what he had seen.
 Opening of the Hedjaz Railway

The new railroad which is now being built by the Turkish

government from Damascus to Medina and on to Mecca will soon be
completed, and who can say whether it will not open up the whole
country to the Gospel? A big American locomotive will soon be
puffing steam and sounding its whistle right near the Kaaba, over
against the most wonderful stone in the world.
 IX
THE CAMEL DRIVER WHO BECAME A PROPHET

I
f one could have all the boys of the world pass by in single file
and take down their names one by one, there would be a great
many who bore the same name. Johns and Henrys and Carls and
Hans there would be by the thousands, but there would be no name
which so many boys had in common, I am sure, as the name of
Mohammed. It is a very safe estimate to say that there are living in
the world to-day no less than five million boys and men who bear
that name.
Yet I wonder how many of you know who Mohammed was, where
he lived and died, and why he has such a world-wide reputation? He
was a poor orphan; his father died before he was born and his
mother only a few years after, but although he was so forlorn and
lived in a very barren part of Arabia, in one of the valleys of the city
of Mecca, he had powerful relatives who were kind to him and
helped him. He was born in the year 570 A. D., about a thousand
years before Columbus discovered America. His mother’s name was
Amina, which means faithful.
There are many strange stories told about him when he was a
boy. One story is that while he was away in the desert with his foster
brother, living with the Arab tribes and growing strong by exercise
and drinking camels’ milk, one day two men dressed in white came
and threw him on the ground. They then took out his heart, by
opening his breast, and squeezed out a drop of black blood, and put
the heart back again, closing up the wound. The Arabs believe that
in this way he got rid of his original sin and was made pure. As a
boy he was pleasing and industrious, and won the name of “the
faithful one.” However, at the time of Mohammed’s childhood, morals
and manners in Mecca were as bad as possible, and he did not have
many good influences to help him in the right way.
When he was about twelve years old, his uncle, Abu-Talib, took
him along on a journey to Syria, as far as Bozra, a town that is
mentioned in the Bible, and not the same as Busrah on the Persian
Gulf. This journey lasted for some months, and it was at this time
that Mohammed met a Christian monk, who, it is reported, told Abu-
Talib to take good care of the youth, for great dignity awaited him.
On this journey Mohammed for the first time came in touch with
Christianity, and was surely impressed by the national and social
customs of Christians; and being a bright boy, he was easily able to
see the difference between the habits and religion of his own nation
and those of the Christians. It was after this journey that he was
anxious to reform the dreadful idolatry and wicked ways of the
Arabian people. From the age of twelve to twenty he lived in the
usual manner of the boys of his day, tending sheep on the hillsides
and valleys of Mecca, and he was so honest and pure and fair during
these years, and such a contrast to those around him, that
everybody gave him the name I told you of—Al Amin, i. e., “the
faithful.” During this time, too, he learned something of what war
was like, for he went with his uncles on two expeditions to fight
against another tribe. When Mohammed was twenty-five years old,
his uncle suggested that he should take charge of a caravan for a
rich lady living in Mecca, and trading products of Mecca for other
things from Syria and other parts of Arabia. On this journey
Mohammed again came in contact with Christians and Jews, and he
must have noticed, too, how, while professing to serve and love the
one true God, they always seemed to be quarrelling about their
religion. Perhaps he saw the truth in both systems and afterwards
thought he could make out of them one simple creed and unite all
mankind in the worship of the only true God.
After his return from this trip, he was married to Khadijah, by
whom he had been employed as camel driver, making zigzag
journeys across the country to sell and exchange his merchandise.
After his marriage he lived happily, so we are told, until his fortieth
year, when he began to have dreams, and became persuaded that
God had called him to be a prophet. Many verses of the Koran were
recited and written down. Mohammed wanted most of all at this
time that his countrymen should put away their idols and worship
only Allah, but some of them were very angry and would have killed
him, if he had not hidden.
Mohammed and Khadijah had six children, but most of them died
when they were young. His daughter Fatimah, when she was old
enough, was married to her adopted brother, Ali; her name is very
much honoured and used by Moslems everywhere.
Sometimes Mohammed would have his dreams very often, and
then again he would go a long time without a revelation. But he
began to believe in himself and told his visions to others, and they
too began to believe in him as a prophet of God. His relatives were
the first ones to come out and follow the new religion. He wanted to
take the idols out of the Kaaba at Mecca, and preached against
idolatry, and for this reason the keepers of the Kaaba were very
angry and persecuted him for his preaching. When the persecution
became too bad, he then recanted or withdrew some of his
statements in regard to the idols and the true worship, and he told
them he had had a vision or revelation that they might retain their
most important gods, or rather, the favourite ones. But after a few
days he repented of this leniency, and told the Meccans he had
made a mistake and all the idols must be destroyed, and they must
worship Allah only. The people began to treat him badly and they
would have killed him if he had not fled to Medina. The persecutors
followed him and nearly overtook him, when he came to a cave and
slipped inside, and one tradition says that after the prophet (on him
be prayers and peace) had gone inside, some pigeons came and sat
on the edge of the cave; also a spider quickly wove a web across the
mouth of the cave and when his pursuers came and looked they
said: “He is not in there, for see the pigeons and the spider’s web;
he cannot be inside,” and thus God preserved the life of Mohammed.
Afterwards those men turned back, and he came out of the cave and
went on to Medina. And there his religion prospered, and
Mohammed saw a vision of the power he might hold, so little by little
the stern purpose of his life—to cleanse his people from idol worship
—became weaker. He gave in, here a little and there a little, and
gave to his followers many harmful privileges, which he said were
revelations from the Angel Gabriel to him. These same privileges
have degraded the nations they have governed, and the religion of
the sword and of plunder appealed to the human heart more than
spiritual things possibly could. He soon gained many thousands of
followers, and grew strong and bold, and began to organize bands
to go out and kill and destroy all who would not follow the new
religion.

When the Arabs return from pilgrimage, they load their baggage on the poor,
patient camel

And thus the camel driver became a great prophet. His name to-
day is called out five times a day from the minarets (i. e., mosque
steeples) in Central Asia, along the shores of the Mediterranean, in
the heart of Africa, in India and the islands of the sea, as well as all
over Arabia and Persia and the Turkish Empire. And if you wish to
help bring back these nations to Jesus Christ and away from
Mohammed, you must be up with the muezzin before the dawn, and
pray and call others to prayer and work in earnest, so that the
children of this generation may have a chance to learn about our
Saviour and theirs, and of all the helpful things He has taught us.

“Hark! ’Tis the muezzin’s cry;

Pray, children, pray;
Moslems in darkness lie,
Pray, children, pray.
Thousands in bondage die;
O hear, while moments fly,
Yours is a calling high:
Pray, children, pray.”
 X
THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANGELS

T
he Arabs are a proud and noble race. They are proud of their
liberty and of their free open-air desert customs. They are proud
of their religion and of their prophet. They are proud of their history
and of their patriarchal descent. But most of all, they are proud of
their language, one of the oldest and most wonderful forms of
human speech. Mohammed himself in his Koran, which you know is
the Moslem Bible, speaks of the Arab tongue as “the language of the
angels.” He and the Arabs believed that Adam and Eve spake Arabic
in Paradise, and that the language of revelation in which God spoke
to His prophets, Abraham, Moses and Solomon, was none other than
the language of the desert, the speech of the Arabs.
One of the most learned Arabs who lived about three hundred
years after Mohammed said: “The wisdom of God hath come down
upon three things:—the brain of the Franks, the hand of the Chinese
and the tongue of the Arabs.” What this Arab philosopher meant was
that while the people of Europe are distinguished for their power of
invention and discovery, the Chinese are distinguished as artists and
artisans, but the Arabs are all of them born orators and poets. The
people of Europe, he meant to say, have brain power, the people of
the Orient skill in handicraft, but the Arabs, eloquence. If you will
read the Book of Job, which was doubtless written in Arabia and
describes early Arabian life, or read the latter chapters of
Mohammed’s Koran, or better still some of the Arabian poetry, you
will appreciate the truth of this wonderful statement.
The first thing that is remarkable about the language of the Arabs
is its wide-spread use. Like English it has spilled itself all over the
map of the world, far beyond its original limits, and like English it
was carried by commerce and by conquest, by merchants and by
missionaries.

FIRST CHAPTER OF THE KORAN

Some time ago an American typewriter firm in advertising a

machine with Arabic characters made the statement that the Arabic
alphabet is used by more people than any other alphabet in the
world. Some one thought that this was an exaggeration, and asked a
professor of languages, “How big a lie is that?” He answered: “It is
true.” The total population of all the countries whose inhabitants use
the Arabic “A B C”—if they use any at all—is larger than the number
of those who use the Latin alphabet or the Chinese character. The
Arabic Koran is read by the Moslem boys in the day-schools not only
of Arabia, but of Turkey, of Afghanistan, Persia, Java, Sumatra, the
whole of North Africa and throughout Central Asia. In the Philippine
Islands there are three hundred thousand Mohammedans whose
only alphabet came from Arabia, and as far west as the mosques of
Morocco the Arabic tongue has travelled and become the language
of law and commerce and religion.
When the early Arabs in their conquests crossed the strait
between Africa and Spain and conquered that country they left many
words behind. And therefore many of the place names in Spain to-
day are Arabic. Gibraltar, for example, is the corrupted form of Jebel
Tarik, which means the mountain of Tarik, the Arab general who first
crossed the straits with his soldiers. And Quadiliquiver, one of the
rivers of Spain, should be spelled Wady El Kebir, or the Big River.
Even the English language has a number of words that came as
Arab guests to the feast of reason and have been adopted into our
family and put into our dictionary. When you speak of algebra,
ciphers, zero, alchemy, alcove, minaret, alcohol, coffee, sofa, amber,
artichokes, gazelles or magazine you are using good Arabic words
which nearly every Arab would understand. To use these words,
however, is quite a different thing from speaking “the language of
the angels” correctly. It is easier to borrow a carpenter’s jack-knife
than to acquire his skill in building a house. Many languages have
borrowed from the Arabs and the Arabs have borrowed from them in
return, but no language is richer than the Arabic in its number of
words.
Would you like to know how the boys and girls talk in Arabia? If
you have read “Topsy Turvy Land” you will remember how they write
their words backward and begin to read at what we call the end of
the book. Their talk as well as their writing seems to us at first very
topsy turvy. Of course, I need not tell you how much they talk, for in
that respect they are just like the boys and girls in America. As they
speak a language, however, very different from English, I am sure
you would like to hear a little about it. Arabic is one of the oldest
and most beautiful languages, and also one of the hardest to learn.
It has so many words that their name for a dictionary is “Kamoos,”
which means “an ocean.” They have five hundred different names
for a lion and two hundred words for serpent. It is said that there
are one thousand different terms in Arabic for sword, and eighty
different words for honey.
Like English the Arabic language has grammar with many rules
(and more exceptions) and the boys dislike it just as much as some
of you do. They have a severe struggle with the alphabet because
each letter has three different forms, as it is used in the beginning,
the middle or the end of a word; and then there are but fifteen
conjugations and twenty different ways of forming the plural, not to
speak of all the moods and tenses and the irregular verbs.
Some people think that Arabic is the most difficult language in the
world. Keith Falconer, the first missionary to Arabia, said, “Arabic
grammars should be strongly bound because learners are so often
found to dash them frantically on the ground.” Another missionary
said that he would rather cross Africa from Alexandria to the Cape of
Good Hope than undertake a second time to master the Arabic
speech.
I shall never forget my early struggles with the language, nor the
place where I sat down to learn my lesson with Dr. Cornelius Van
Dyke. He was a master of Arabic and with Dr. Eli Smith translated
the whole Bible into the Arabic speech. Here it was in the shade of
his beautiful veranda at Beirut, Syria, that I began to learn the
irregular verb. It takes a long time for grown-up people to learn a
new language, but it does not seem hard for the Arab boys and girls.
Beside the proper talk of grown-up people there is baby talk in
Arabia which mothers teach the little brown toddlers before they
walk out of the mat-huts and the black, camel-hair tents into the
wide world. Yes, and there are also slang words which the camel
drivers and the donkey boys use with and on each other.
 The baby talk is much like English. Father is baba; dog is
wowwow; pretty is noonoo; stop is tootoo; chicken is kookoo, and
when baby falls they say baff!
The language of these little angels and the grown-up ones in
Arabia is very poetical. The Arabs, because they live in the desert
and look up into the big, blue sky and far out to the horizon where
the mirage paints desert pictures every day, are full of imagination
and live in an atmosphere of poetry. They love jingling words and
proverbs and pretty sayings and figures of speech.
A mosquito has only a sting in New Jersey. In Arabia they call him
aboo fas, which means “father-of-an-ax”! In America a tramp is a
tramp, but the Arabs call him a son-of-the-road. And what could be
prettier than their name for echo, bint-el-jebel, “daughter of the
mountain”? Why, there is a whole fairy story in that one word! And if
you go down the columns of the Arabic dictionary you can find many
a story locked up in some word and only waiting to be opened.
In North Arabia when they say, “How-do-you-do,” the proper
expression is, “What is the colour of your condition?” This may be
philosophical, but it does not make good sense in English.
Strawberries are called French mulberries, and the name given to
potatoes when first brought to Bahrein was aliyeywellam; why this
name was given, I cannot tell. Where could you find a better name
for wine than the Arab um-el-khabaith, “mother of vices”? No
wonder all the Arab children are staunch prohibitionists. And you will
know more about the nights in Arabia when I tell you that the
common name for jackal is “son-of-howling”!
“The language of the angels” is not altogether lovely and
beautiful; alas, it bears the marks of a false religion all over it like
scratches on marble or ink-stains on a beautiful piece of handwriting.
Mohammed’s life and Mohammed’s teaching were not like the life
and teaching of Jesus Christ, and so the Arabic language abounds in
words that are not pure and not lovely. The missionaries in Egypt
and in Syria have done much to purify and elevate the language of
the Arabs by giving them Christian books and papers and above all
the Holy Bible in their own tongue. The Arab children in the mission
schools now sing Christian hymns and many of the stories that you
love to read, such as “Ben Hur” and “Black Beauty” and “Robinson
Crusoe,” have been translated into Arabic. At the Beirut press alone
about twenty-five million pages of Christian books are printed every
year.
When the Bible takes the place of the Koran, the Arab speech with
all its beauty and strength will become more than ever “the
language of the angels.”
 XI
PEARLS AND PEARL DIVERS

N
early all the British India steamers in their zigzag journeys up
the Persian Gulf, calling first at the Arabian coast and then at
the Persian coast, stop at the pearl islands of Bahrein. Half-way up
the Gulf and thirty miles from the mainland of Arabia, this group of
islands has been famous for centuries as the most valuable pearl
fishery in the world. For at least two thousand years the Arabs have
been diving in these waters and bringing up the costly shells. Before
the days of Christ, and even before the time of Solomon, pearls from
Bahrein were shipped to the Western world, and it is probable that
the dress and the conversation of the men and the boys of to-day is
about the same as it was a thousand years ago. The boats are
probably of the same pattern, with very little improvement.
Bahrein is an Arabic word which means the two seas, and this
name was given to the islands because the Arabs fancied that here
two seas met, the fresh water and the salt water mingling together.
The islands have very little rainfall—during the summer none at all—
and yet they are famous for their fresh-water springs, which find
their source on the mainland of Arabia or Persia, and the water not
only bubbles out in pools and wells on shore, but below the tide
level there are fresh-water springs several miles out at sea. You
would be interested to see the Arabs go out in their boats, place a
bamboo over the opening in the rock and then collect fresh water
above sea level in their great leather skins.
Bahrein is historically most interesting, because here the old
Chaldeans and Phœnicians made their home. Some of the mounds
on the island are older than the ruins of Babylon, and it is said that
the Phœnicians worshipped the fish-god who, it is supposed, carried
Noah’s ark over the flood.
 The pearl fisheries at Bahrein employ about 3,500 boats, large
and small. The boats measure from one to fifty tons. The smaller
boats carry from three to fifteen men and work near the shore; the
large boats, employing from fifteen to thirty men, fish all over the
Gulf. It is a pretty sight to see the fleet sailing out of the harbour,
the large sails, set to the wind, gleaming white in the sun, the blue
waters underneath and the bluer sky overhead. Have you ever seen
a diving outfit? It looks rather ungainly to me. The Arab divers do
not use anything so elaborate as do the divers in America. White
overalls to cover their dark skin (because they say sharks do not
care for white people), a fatam, or clothes-pin on the nose, and
leather thimbles for scratching up the shells, and a basket to hold
the catch, with a rope attached to a girdle to draw them up with—
this is the complete outfit. When prayers have been said and a
Bismillah, down he goes, quickly fills the basket, and with a tug on
the rope, he is hauled up, his basket is emptied while he takes a
short breathing spell, then down again; and so on from sunrise to
sunset.
The divers pass through many dangers in bringing the pearls from
the bottom of the ocean to the surface. Sharks are the most
terrifying, and during the pearl season a number of divers lose their
lives, or are maimed; a leg or an arm has to be amputated because
the cruel, sharp, powerful mouth of the shark caught the fisherman
while he was seeking goodly pearls for us. A large number of them
are afflicted with rheumatism as a consequence of their calling. In
the boat, besides the men who are doing the work, is a man who is
a substitute for them in prayer. The divers are too busy to observe
the stated hours of prayer, so this man will repeat the prayers in
place of each man. He is the Levite, and performs the religious
ceremonies for every other man and boy. He must be occupied all
the time on the boats where there is a crew of thirty men, and he
must say the prayers five times a day for each man.
 The Evolution of a Pearl Button

The Arabs say that pearls come from a raindrop which fell while
the oyster had its mouth open; each drop of rain thus caught is a
prize for the diver. “Heaven born and cradled in the deep blue sea,”
it is the purest of gems and, in their eyes, the most precious. When
the pearl oysters are brought up, they are left on deck over night,
and next morning are opened by means of a curved knife six inches
long. Until a few years ago, all the shells were thrown back into the
sea as useless, but now they are brought to shore by the ton and
deposited in some merchant’s yard. He employs natives to scrape off
the outside roughness, and then they are packed in wooden crates
and exported in large quantities.
On shore the pearls are classified according to weight, size, shape,
colour and brilliancy. You would think the pearl merchants a strange
kind of people. They carry the most valuable pearls around with
them everywhere, tied up in turkey-red twill. They have no safes nor
banks, so the only safe way they can think of is to carry them
around and run the risk of being knocked down and robbed; but
since the Indian government has made Bahrein a protectorate, such
robberies are rare.
The pearl merchants are called tawawis, which means those who
handle the brass sieve, or tas. When the pearls are brought on
shore, they are classified according to size first of all, and to do this,
each merchant has a nest of beautiful sieves fitting one into the
other. The smallest has holes as big as the end of a pencil, and they
go down gradually in size until the largest sieve, which is about six
inches across, has holes as fine as mustard seeds. Any day during
the pearl season you may see the Arab merchants sitting cross-
legged in their houses, sifting pearls, and when they are classified
and piled up in little heaps, white and shining in the bright sunlight
on the red cloth that covers the floor, it is a sight worth seeing.
The total value of the pearl harvest each year is at least a million
dollars, but most of the profit goes into the hands of the dealers.
The divers work for wages, and many of them are heavily in debt. In
spite of the dangers they incur, the divers love their work, because
pearl diving always has in it the element of gambling. One may work
a whole day and find only pearls of small value, and then perhaps
bring up a fortune in an hour. The most beautiful pearl I ever saw
was found in the waters at Bahrein some ten years ago, and was
sold for ten thousand dollars. It must have been to such a fortunate
pearl diver that Browning referred in his verses:
 “There are two moments in a diver’s life:
One when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,
Then when, a prince, he rises with his prize.”

The time for pearl diving is from May until the end of September.
During the winter months the cold weather interferes with the work,
and the men live inshore. Then it is that they come in crowds to our
hospital, and we have the joy of preaching to them from the parable
of the Pearl of great price, and no audience appreciates a sermon on
that text as much as the men who know what it costs to bring up
the pearls. You remember the parable: “The kingdom of heaven is
like unto a man that is a merchant seeking goodly pearls, and having
found one pearl of great price, he went and sold all that he had and
bought it.” When we tell the Arabs that the Pearl of great price was
the kingdom of God, peace and righteousness and joy, which Jesus
Christ purchased for us at the cost of His own life and now offers
freely to all who will believe in Him, they understand something of
the message.
Will you not pray for the pearl divers of Bahrein that many of them
may find the Pearl of great price, and that their humble homes,—
mat-huts along the shore of the great sea—may be made glad by
the joy of a Christian civilization and the knowledge of our Saviour?
It is not hard to love them for their own sake, and I well remember
many a happy hour spent with them in their boats or sitting on the
beach, talking over their work. Sir Edwin Arnold referred to them in
these lines:
“Dear as the wet diver to the eyes
Of his pale wife, who waits and weeps on shore,
By sands of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf;
Plunging all day in the blue waves; at night,
Having made up his toll of precious pearls,
Rejoins her in their hut upon the shore.”
 XII
A PIONEER JOURNEY ON THE PIRATE COAST

I
t was on Saturday morning, February 9, 1901, that Elias, our
colporteur, and I started for a journey along the eastern coast of
Arabia, and, as we hoped, inland. Our expectations of a long camel
journey and the sight of villages not yet marked on the map
between the coast and Muscat were disappointed. But the result was
a journey of 440 miles and more along the coast to the rocky cape
that guards the narrow entrance to the Gulf. Our experiences were
so interesting that I will relate some of them to you.
Did you ever read the droll story, “Three Men in a Boat”? Well, we
were eleven men in a boat, not to speak of a fine Arab horse and a
yelping greyhound, presents from the Ruler of Bahrein to the Ruler
of Abu Thabi. Our boat was of the usual native style without any
cabin or even an awning, and measured twenty feet across the
beam and fifty from bowsprit to poop. The noble quadruped had the
largest share of the scanty space midships; the dog was confined to
the forecastle lest prayers be impossible; for the Mohammedans
believe that the dog is an unclean animal, and that it is impossible to
pray in any place where a dog has walked or sat without first
washing it. The two first-class passengers and their boxes were on
the left side of the poop; the crew slept, smoked, washed
themselves, and ate their dried fish and rice anywhere; and the
captain with a priest and a merchant squatted at our right. I will not
weary your patience to relate how many days after we intended to
start the sail was hoisted and we were off. One never expects a
native sailing craft to leave until the three days of grace (and
grumbling impatience) are twice over. But good Abdullah bin Kambar
was not altogether to blame; two of his sailors ran away, and he had
to look them up and urge them on board. With a fair, brisk wind
filling the huge sail we were all happy to start and forgot the delays
and our dried bread baked three days too early.
Our boat was bound for Abu Thabi, the first important town on
the coast south. The wind continued favourable, and on Monday we
were sailing between two islands, mere rocks and uninhabited
except by a few fishermen during the season. A little further towards
the mainland is the large island of Dalma, and there was a long
dispute between the captain and the mate as to which island we
were passing. When the words waxed warm between them my chart
decided the dispute. This island is an old centre for the pearl-fishers,
and every season there is a large gathering here of merchants and
divers; a sort of market-place on the highway of the sea.
The weariness of five days and nights in the boat was relieved in
many ways. There was opportunity to read and plenty of
interruption.
We had our meals to cook and tried to fish with a line and hook;
once the captain hit a wild duck with his rusty gun, but although all
helped to lower the boat and they pursued the wounded bird, she
escaped. One day we saw a large shark, and that afternoon there
were some good fish stories. At night the black slave Abdullah sat at
the wheel and told stories as only a Negro-Arab can tell them;
stories of the new Arabian Nights, and of how an Arab sharper stole
a favourite horse by putting the bridle on his own neck and having
his mate run off with the horse! Several times it was our turn to lead
the conversation, and we had a splendid opportunity to give “line
upon line and precept upon precept.” One can judge at once of the
ignorance and open-heartedness of the Arab sailors by the remark
they commonly make after they have had a missionary or colporteur
for passenger: “We had no idea that Christians were such decent
folk and even prayed to Allah.”
At three o’clock on Thursday afternoon we were in sight of Abu
Thabi, or “father-of-the-gazelle.” It was my first visit to this town,
although Elias had been there before. We found the ruler kind,
friendly and very intelligent. We were assigned to a large room in
one of his houses, and during our stay of four days there was
abundance of food sent to us from the ruler’s table, and all our
wants were supplied from his beneficence,—huge dishes piled with
rice, steeped with gravy and crowned with several pounds of prime
roast mutton, the whole surrounded with dates and bread loaves, on
a large circular mat, and washed down with perfumed water. We
were never hungry.
When the dwellers in the mat-huts heard of the arrival of
foreigners with a medicine chest and books our room was filled with
the curious or the ailing from early dawn until after sunset. That is
the only drawback to their kindness; the Arab idea of hospitality
does not include the blessing of privacy for their guest. One is never
left alone, and if you seek solitude they set you down as a magician,
or delver into the hidden things of nature which are forbidden to all
true believers. So we had to forego meditation, reading, and even
the change of clothing until nightfall, after our long sea journey.
It was a queer crowd that collected in the court and filled our little
room; a long row of Arabs sitting on the mats all around the four
sides of the court. Most of them were Oman Arabs, but there was
one priest from Mecca who had more to say than all the rest. He
was a wanderer who wore a spotless white turban and a sneering
smile. His present residence, he said, was on the Island of Kais, in
the Gulf, and he lived as do all of his kind by teaching school and
copying charms for the ignorant. We had some discussions and more
quiet talks together after the crowd left. It was sad to hear from him
what dense ignorance there is regarding our religion. The news of
Queen Victoria’s death had just reached there and the sage from
Mecca told fabulous stories of how and why Christians were ruled by
women! Our sales of Scripture were not large, but there was a
demand for other books. One poor but learned man brought a
manuscript copy of Al Hariri (the Arabian Shakespeare) in exchange
for other books.
We left Abu Thabi by sailing-boat for Debai, eighty miles up the
coast in a straight line. The wind compelled us to go zigzag.
 This place has become the metropolis of Western Oman, and in
population, progress, commerce and architecture far surpasses all
the other towns. Between Abu Thabi and Debai the coast is desert
and neither date-tree nor hut is seen; so flat is the country that a hill
two hundred feet high (the only landmark for sailors) is called “the
High Mountain.”
We did not tarry long at Debai, although we had a pleasant
morning at the house of the ruler and met some Arabs from the
interior. One of them said he was willing for a proper consideration
to take me all the way across Arabia to Jiddah, the port of Mecca. In
the afternoon we started selling Scriptures on the outskirts of the
town and in a very short time the crowd collected. Women came
with copper coins and bright boys brought their savings to purchase
Gospels—in the language of our trade, “the true story of the Living
Prophet Jesus.” After we left Debai on donkeys two boys who were
late ran after us and overtook us a mile from the town; they brought
money and paid for three more books. The captain of our boat took
us to his house for breakfast on our arrival, and showed us some
poetry his wife had written. She talked with us and seemed versed in
the Koran; we left her a Gospel.
From Debai to Sharkeh we rode on asses, and as our two chests
were heavy they were put, one each, on the backs of two other
asses; the distance is about ten miles. At Sharkeh we met old friends
and were glad that even after a previous visit we were welcomed.
An Arab merchant showed us much kindness and offered us a shop
with a prophet’s chamber above it for rent. Since this visit our
missionaries often come here. From Sharkeh we crossed over to
Lingah, and thence back to Bahrein by the mail steamer, but Elias
went on visiting Ajman and the villages beyond all the way to Ras-el-
Jebel, which means “the top of the mountain.” The Arabic version of
the seventy-second Psalm gives the promise in this way: “There shall
be an handful of corn in the earth on Ras-el-Jebel; the fruit thereof
shall shake like Lebanon.”
 XIII
ACROSS THE DESERT OF OMAN

O
man is a little peninsula that sticks out eastward from the big
peninsula of Arabia, and it might almost be called an island. On
three sides are the waters of the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf,
and on the west is the great sea of sand which the Arabs call the
“empty abode,” and which has never been crossed by any traveller
as far as we know. The Arabs themselves are afraid to venture
beyond the limits of the oases that touch its borders, and on all the
maps of Arabia this desert is marked “blank and unexplored.”
Because the people of Oman for centuries past lived on such an
island with the sea on one side and the desert on the other, they are
quite distinct from the other Arabs. The language they speak has a
peculiar accent, and their religion, although they are Mohammedans,
is in many respects different from that of the other parts of Arabia.
I want to tell you of two journeys taken across this province. Many
others have been made since, and our medical missionaries can now
visit all the villages in the mountains back of the coast. On May 9,
1900, a colporteur and I put our two chests of books and medicines
on board a small sailing-boat, and at four o’clock the wind was
favourable to leave Bahrein harbour. We intended to visit the pirate
coast, and thence, if the way proved open, to cross the horn of
Oman to Muscat, overland.
The captain and crew of our boat were all strict Moslems, and
made no secret of the fact that formerly they were slave-traders.
Crossing by zigzag lines to the Persian coast to avoid shoals and
catch the wind, we reached Bistana and then sailed across the Gulf
direct for Sharkeh. Half-way across is the little island of Abu Musa,
with a small Arab population, but splendid pasturage, good milk and
water. The chief export is red oxide, of which there are two hills with
a boundless supply. Steamers occasionally call here for this cheap,
marketable ballast; we left our witness in the shape of Arabic
Gospels.
On May 14th we reached Sharkeh, the chief town on the pirate
coast. Formerly this entire region was noted for the savage ferocity
of its inhabitants. Thanks to English commerce and gunboats, these
fanatic people have become tamed; most of them have given up
piracy and turned to pearl-diving for a livelihood; their black tents
and rude rock dwellings are making room for the three or four
important towns of Sharkeh, Debai, Abu Thabi, and Ras el Kheima.
We found the Arabs rather hospitable, and quite willing to hear our
message. The mat-hut, set apart for our use, we for seven days
made dispensary and reception-room. Here over two hundred Arabs
came to get medicines, buy books, or discuss the reason of our
errand. Many were the quiet talks during those days with all sorts
and conditions of Arabs. There was often no rest until long after
sunset; and no sooner had the muezzin called to daylight prayer
than the visitors began to walk in again. They were a pleasant lot of
people, and more sociable than the Arabs of Yemen, while less
dignified than those from Nejd.
We heard on every side that travelling in the interior of Oman was
safe, so, after bargaining with camel-drivers, we secured two
companions and five camels to take us to Sohar for the sum of
twenty rials or Arabian dollars. At 9 p. m. on May 20th we left, and
after a short rest at midnight to water the camels, marched until
nine o’clock the next day. By going as much as possible by starlight
to avoid the heat, and resting during the day under some scraggy
acacia tree or in the shadow of a Bedouin fort, we completed the
distance of ninety odd miles in a little over four days. A large part of
the way we took was desert, with no villages or even nomad booths;
the more usual route by Wady Hom being a little unsafe, we
followed Wady Hitta.