Note 497
THE HUNCHBACK’S TALE.
Arab. "Judri," lit. "small stones" from the hard gravelly feeling of the pustules (Rodwell, p. 20). The disease is generally supposed to be the growth of Central Africa where it is still a plague and passed over to Arabia about the birth-time of Mohammed. Thus is usually explained the "war of the elephant" (Koran, chapt. cv.) when the Abyssinian army of Abrahah, the Christian, was destroyed by swallows (Abábíl which Major Price makes the plural of Abilah = a vesicle) which dropped upon them "stones of baked clay," like vetches (Pilgrimage ii. 175). See for details Sale (in loco) who seems to accept the miraculous defence of the Ka'abah. For the horrors of small-pox in Central Intertropical Africa the inoculation, known also to the Badawin of Al-Hijáz and other details, readers will consult "The Lake Regions of Central Africa" (ii. 318). The Hindus "take the bull by the horns" and boldly make "Sítlá" (small-pox) a goddess, an incarnation of Bhawáni, deëss of destruction-reproduction. In China small-pox is believed to date from B.C. 1200; but the chronology of the Middle Kingdom still awaits the sceptic.
…e Hunchback in his arms bore him along the streets, preceded by his wife who kept crying, "O my son, Allah keep thee! what part paineth thee and where hath this small-pox[FN#497] attacked thee?" So all who saw them said "'Tis a child sick of small-pox." [FN#498] They went along asking for the physician's house till folk directed them to that of a leach which was a Jew. They knocked at the door, and there came down to them a bl…
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