CHAPTER ONE
IN THE WAY OF ALLAH
One summer day, while the sun shone brightly in the sapphire sky over Central Asia, Mohammed Beg lay amid the flowers of a mountain pasture watching the herds of grazing sheep. He was thinking—thinking of his grandfather, now an old man, who was soon to start on the pilgrimage to Mecca. His grandfather, a sincere and devout Moslem, had been planning this pilgrimage for many years. Every Moslem hopes to make the journey to Mecca once in a lifetime, and thus fill up one's full measure of devotion to the sacred law of Islam.
Mohammed Beg was deeply interested in the old man's preparations, and the more he thought of the great journey the more he longed to go with his grandfather, Abdullah. How grand if he, too, could be a haji (the title given to one who has made the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca). In all his life the aged Abdullah had never left his home city of Kashgar, and from his birth had lived high up on the "roof of the world" in the heart of Central Asia. He had never crossed those vast ranges of the highest mountains of the world which separate his native land of Chinese Turkestan from the scorching plains of India.
