Death, want, misfortune and misery of every kind had filled the record of the year for one and all of the people, but this one thing in which but a few of them only could have any direct personal interest, this was "the most important event of the year!"
Is it any wonder that the people refused to fall down and worship the golden calf of the French Republic that Bonaparte and his Staff were so vainly trying to exalt!
That the reader may the more justly appreciate Gabarty's comment on the history of the year he must recall two facts with reference to the composition of his history--first that it was written at the time. It is not a record compiled in after years when the feelings, emotions, and thoughts of the moment had been forgotten or blurred, It was rather a diary scribbled down from day to day, and one written, too, with no special object other than that of recording the principal occurrences of the time. A mere narrative, not written in support of a theory, nor as a study of men or things, nor as a text for the exposition of the author's views, but simply in the plainest and most literal sense a mere narrative. Secondly, it is not as an opinion but as a fact that he puts this failure of the pilgrimage down as the most important event of that disastrous year. And he puts it down as a fact in terms that show clearly that he believes that as a matter of opinion it is one no one who may ever read his history will for a moment think of questioning or doubting in any way.
If the reader can by any possibility bring himself to comprehend in the faintest degree the true purport of this summing up of the year's history he will have got a long, a very long, way on the road to a clear comprehension of the Egyptian as he was in 1798, and as he still is.
It may help the reader somewhat to form some idea of his own on this subject if I turn aside for a moment to tell him what this pilgrimage to Mecca is, and how it is regarded by the Moslems of Egypt and other countries.
Itself surrounded by the hills of the desert district of the Hegaz, the city of Mecca has grown around and encircles a great rectangular open but cloister-bounded space, in the centre of which rises a flat-roofed building occupying a mere spot in the vast courtyard, and which, but for its height, might be termed a cube, clothed on all sides by a hanging cloth of the deepest black, relieved only by a band of Arabic lettering wrought in gold. Nature herself has produced no more impressive sight than that presented by this small building thus strangely garbed and hid away in the wastes of the desert. In size, in form, in all things save its sable garment gently swaying to the slightest breeze, the building is one that would never draw from the stranger a second glance, but as it is, once seen it dwells upon the mind for ever with a vividness of detail no other sight can produce. This is the _Beit Allah_, the "House of God" of Islam, first erected, as Moslem tradition relates, by the Prophet Abrahim, and ever since a place of pilgrimage for all true worshippers of God. Hither while yet Christianity and Islam were yet unknown, in the "days of ignorance," when the Arabs still worshipped idols of stone, they came from all parts of the Arab-speaking world as pilgrims, counting all the many dangers of the road as nought compared to the rich rewards awaiting in the future those who should accomplish this duty. Enjoined upon the Moslems as one of the five great obligations of their creed, the pilgrimage to-day draws Moslems from the most distant parts of the world by long and tedious journeys through the wildest and least-civilised parts of the earth, heedless of dangers and difficulties, counting it a gain to suffer by the way, and content to die once their eyes have fallen upon the sacred building. And of all Moslems the Egyptian, and most especially the Cairene, has a special and peculiar interest in the pilgrimage since it is the privilege of Cairo to supply from year to year the new _Kiswa_, or clothing for the _Beit Allah_.