Word: meccas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kentucky wife ended in divorce, and in 1947 he decided to go back to the Middle East. He bought a small house in Damascus, married again and settled down to a simple life on skimpy savings and a U.S. Army pension. This spring he prepared for the hadj to Mecca...
...instructing them in the religious procedures required of a pilgrim and arranging food and lodging for the entire trip. Life used to be grim in Jidda during the ten days of the hadj, as heat-sick pilgrims squatted in the streets gathering strength for the 46-mile trek to Mecca. But newly rich Saudi Arabia has recently built a "Pilgrim City"-a roofed compound, equipped with food shops, electricity, running water and toilets. Here pilgrims wait out a three-day quarantine before inspection by doctors...
...Jidda to Mecca. When his day of departure finally arrived, Ahmed set out on the road through the mountains clogged with thousands of pilgrims ("White, brown, black, yellow people, all moving together"). As they streamed along the road together-a few in cars and buses, some on mules, but most on foot-a steady chant rose in unison from the column: "Labbaika Allahumma labbaika! [Here we are, Lord, here...
Fourteen miles from Mecca, signs warned in Arabic and English: HALT-RESTRICTED AREA. MOSLEMS ONLY PERMITTED BEYOND THIS POINT. ToUghlooking guards armed with clubs and submachine guns inspected passports carefully to weed out any infidel. As the pilgrims rounded the last bend and saw Mecca white and dazzling in the desert sun, their chant burst into a roar: "La illaha ilia Allah, Muhammad rasulu Allah [There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet of Allah...
Ahmed stayed in Mecca eight days, living in one of the small hotels that crowd the city. Again and again he visited the Kaaba, the small cubic building that houses the sacred Black Stone-the center of the earth for Moslems. Guided by his mutawwif, Ahmed queued up to put his head in the bowl-like enclosure to kiss the Black Stone, worn away by the lips of pilgrims, and added his kiss to the kisses of centuries. He made his seven counterclockwise turns around the Kaaba, three times running and four times walking...