“This is the grave of my mother ... the Lord hath permitted me to visit it....  I called my mother to remembrance, and the tender memory of her overcame me and I wept.”

The sensitive, over-nervous child, left thus solitary, away from all his kindred, must have brought back with him to Mecca confused but vivid impressions of the long journey and of the catastrophe which lay at the end of it.  The uncertainty of his future, and the joys of gaining at last a foster-father in Abd al Muttalib, finds reflection in the Kuran in one little burst of praise to God:  “Did He not find thee an orphan, and furnish thee with a refuge?”

Life for two years as the foster-child of Abd al Muttalib, the venerable, much honoured chief of the house of Hashim, passed very pleasantly for Mahomet.  He was the darling of his grandfather’s last years of life; for, perhaps having pity on his defencelessness, perhaps divining with that prescience which often marks old age, something of the revelation this child was to be to his countrymen, he protected him from the harshness of his uncles.  A rug used to be placed in the shadow of the Kaaba, and there the aged ruler rested during the heat of the day, and his sons sat around him at respectful distance, listening to his words.  But the child Mahomet, who loved his grandfather, ran fearlessly up, and would have seated himself by Abd al Muttalib’s side.  Then the sons sought to punish him for his lack of reverence, but their father prevented them: 

“Leave the child in peace.  By the God of my fathers, I swear he will one day be a mighty prophet.”

So Mahomet remained in close attendance upon the old man, until he died in the eighth year after the Year of the Elephant, and there was mourning for him in the houses of his sons.

When Abd al Muttalib knew his end was near he sent for his daughters, and bade them make lamentation over him.  We possess traditional accounts of these funeral songs; they are representative of the wild rhetorical eloquence of the poetry of the day.  They lose immensely in translation, and even in reading with the eye instead of hearing, for they were never meant to find immortality in the written words, but in the speech of men.

“When in the night season a voice of loud lament proclaimed the sorrowful tidings I wept, so that the tears ran down my face like pearls.  I wept for a noble man, greater than all others, for Sheibar, the generous, endowed with virtues; for my beloved father, the inheritor of all good things, for the man faithful in his own house, who never shrank from combat, who stood fast and needed not a prop, mighty, well-favoured, rich in gifts.  If a man could live for ever by reason of his noble nature—­but to none is this lot vouchsafed—­he would remain untouched of death because of his fair fame and his good deeds.”