Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/35

Rh up, and bring down to earth with him, an anvil, a pair of tongs or pincers, two hammers, and a needle. He was cast out of Paradise at the gate named the Gate of Penitence; Hawa from the Gate of Mercy; Iblis at the Gate of Malediction; and the serpent at the Gate of Calamity. So all four of them fell to the earth, each coming down in a different place: Adam at Serendib or Ceylon; Hawa at Jiddah; Iblis at ’Ailah, or ’Akabah; and the serpent at Isfahan in Persia. Two hundred years elapsed before Adam and Hawa met once more at Jebel ’Arafat, the mountain of Recognition, near Mecca; and, in the meantime, fresh horrors had been enacted, for, being under the curse, Hawa had borne offspring of the seed of devils, and Adam had got many children by female jinns. The descendants of those unclean monsters under the name of afrits, rassad, ghouls, marids, and so on, still people the earth and try to harm mankind.

What happened at the end of two centuries, how Adam repented and was taken by Gabriel to find Hawa at ’Arafat, and how the forgiven couple went and lived in Ceylon, we need not tell, nor the story of their sons Habil, Kabil, and Seth, seeing that this is known to all the People of the Book, whether Moslems, Christians, or Jews. What, however, is not generally known, is that Allah showed Adam all his posterity, even all men that should ever live, between his own days and the day of the Resurrection. It came to pass in this manner: Allah stroked Adam’s back, and forthwith there issued from the latter’s loins multitudes of men,