The Turning of Arrival

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Keeping the shrine on our left, we began to turn. Ibrahim and Mardini went ahead, calling over their shoulders as we followed. There were special supplications for every angle of the building, but not many pilgrims had them memorized. Now and then we passed someone reading prayers from a handbook, but most people were speaking from the heart. I asked what was proper. The invocations all but drowned us out. "One God, many tongues!" Mardini shouted. "Say what you want, or repeat what you hear. Or just say, 'God is great.' " I dropped back into the wheel and did all three.

midnight hajji 

Sunstroke in June was so common that the Saudis, as pilgrim hosts, had set up 150 centers equipped to treat it. Green Crescent nurses staffed several hundred clinics in town. The TV preached prevention every evening, and leaflets were passed out in the streets. The essential advice-avoid direct sunlight-went mostly unheeded. Visiting hajjis continued to choke the roads.

Heat was our biggest adversary. I became what Mardini called a midnight hajji. I slept between prayers while the sun was up and visited the Haram every evening. Most of the time between dusk and dawn I spent at the mosque, a usual regime in June. The thermometer on the sill edged nearer 120 degrees Fahrenheit every day. The sun, bouncing off the streets, added ten degrees.

One night near the tawaf, I met two young newlyweds from Atlanta. She was of Turkish background. He was blond, a novice insurance adjuster. Both had grown up in the South.

Haram honeymooners were not unusual. I sometimes passed them escorting each other through the galleries. Inside the mosque, they practiced shy decorum.

On the street, when the crowds were large, they might hold hands. Mardini said that in families who could afford it, the hajj was considered the best way to cement a marriage, before having children.

When I asked these two from Georgia whether they spoke Arabic, the man looked sheepish. His wife replied, "Ah do speak Turkish. But Ah make ma prayahs in English."

mina to arafat 

At 7 a.m. all of Mina was in motion. I had been through Super Bowl gridlock in San Francisco. I had witnessed Woodstock and marched on Washington. I had never experienced a throng approaching this one. It was as if the 20th century's thickest traffic tie-up had embarked on an epic journey back to Roman times. A tricky desert sky hung over everything, compressing volume, curving distance, befuddling the eye.

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