Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/94

70 His determination. . . Cain’s offering was a sheaf of the very worst of his corn, but Abel’s a fat lamb of the best of his flock. Allah having declared His acceptance of the latter in a visible manner, Cain said to his brother, “I will certainly kill thee.” Abel was the stronger of the two, and would easily have pre- vailed against his brother, but he answered, “ If thou stretchest forth thine hand against me, to slay me, I will not stretch forth my hand against thee to slay thee ; for I fear Allah, the Lord of all creatures.” So Cain began to consider in what way he should effect the murder, and as he was doing so the devil appeared to him in human shape, and showed him how to do it, by crushing the head of a bird between two stones. Cain, having committed the fratricide, became exceedingly troubled in his mind, and carried the dead body on his shoulders for a con- siderable time not knowing where to conceal it, till it stank horribly ;and then Allah taught him to bury it by the example of a raven, who, having killed another raven, in his presence, dug a pit with his claws and beak, and buried him therein. Another tradition is that Cain was at last accidentally slain by Lamech with an arrow, when the latter was hunting at Tell el Kaimin, near the Kishon, at the northern foot of Mount Carmel. (See Sale’s Koran, pp. 76 and 77, text and foot-note. Chandos Classics.) P. 12. Burial of Adam.—A Christian tradition to the effect that Adam was buried with his head resting at the foot of Calvary, and that he was reawakened to life by some drops of Christ’s blood trickling on to his skull at the Crucifixion, may be traced back to the time of Origen in the second century. III P. 13. The nékiis.—The nakis is a plank or a plate of metal which is struck with a mallet to announce the time of service. When the Moslems under Omar Ibn el Khattab first took Jerusalem (a.p. 637), the use of church-bells was prohibited, but the naktis was allowed because Noah, by Allah’s command, used one thrice a day to call the workmen employed on the ark, and to attract people to hear his warnings of an approaching judg- ment. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 A.D., bells were reinstalled in the churches. One of the complaints made by the Latin Patriarch against the Knights of St John, was that they disturbed the services held in the Church of the Sepulchre, by ringing the bells of their great church close by. The church bells throughout the Holy Land were silenced when the Crusaders were finally driven away in a.p. 1292, but they had ceased ringing in Jerusalem when the city fell into the hands