THE third pilgrim on our list is Giovanni Finati, who, under the Moslem name of “Haji Mohammed,” made the campaign against the Wahhabis for the recovery of Meccah and Al-Madinah. A native of Ferrara, the eldest of the four scions of a small landed proprietor, “tenderly attached to his mother,” and brought up most unwillingly for a holy vocation — to use his own words, “instructed in all that course of frivolous and empty ceremonials and mysteries, which form a principal feature in the training of a priest for the Romish Church,” in A.D. 1805, Giovanni Finati’s name appeared in the list of Italian conscripts. After a few vain struggles with fate, he was marched to Milan, drilled and trained; the next year his division was ordered to the Tyrol, where the young man, “brought up for the church,” instantly deserted. Discovered in his native town, he was sent under circumstances of suitable indignity to join his regiment at Venice, where a general act of grace, promulgated on occasion of Napoleon’s short visit, preserved him from a platoon of infantry. His next move was to Spalato, in Dalmatia, where he marched under General Marmont to Cattaro, the last retreat of the hardy and warlike Montenegrins. At Budoa, a sea-port S.E. of Ragusa, having consulted an Albanian “captain-merchant,” Giovanni Finati, and fifteen other Italians —

“including the sergeant’s wife,” swore fidelity to one another, and deserted with all their arms and accoutrements. They passed into the Albanese territory, and were hospitably treated as “soldiers, who had deserted from the infidel army in Dalmatia,” by the Pasha, posted at Antivari to keep check upon the French operations. At first they were lodged in the Mosque, and the sergeant’s wife had been set apart from the rest; but as they refused to apostatize they were made common slaves, and worked at the quarries till their “backs were sore.” Under these circumstances, the sergeant discovering and promulgating his discovery that “the Mahometans believe as we do in a god; and upon examination that we might find the differences from our mother church to be less than we had imagined,”— all at once came the determination of professing to be Mohammedans. Our Italian Candide took the name of Mahomet, and became pipe-bearer to a Turkish general officer in the garrison. This young man trusted the deserter to such an extent that the doors of the Harim were open to him1, and Giovanni Finati repaid his kindness by seducing Fatimah, a Georgian girl, his master’s favourite wife. The garrison then removed to Scutari. Being of course hated by his fellow servants, the renegade at last fell into disgrace, and exchanging the pipe-stick for the hatchet, he became a hewer of wood. This degradation did not diminish poor Fatimah’s affection: she continued to visit him, and to leave little presents and tokens for him in his room. But presently the girl proved likely to become a mother — their intercourse was more than suspected — Giovanni Finati had a dread of circumcision,2 so he came to the felon resolution of flying alone from Scutari. He happened to meet his “original friend the captain-merchant,” and in March, 1809, obtained from him a passage to Egypt, the Al-Dorado to which all poverty-struck Albanian adventurers were then flocking. At Alexandr[i]a the new Mahomet, after twice deserting from a Christian service, at the risk of life and honour, voluntarily enlisted as an Albanian private soldier in a Moslem land; the naïvete with which he admires and comments upon his conduct is a curious moral phenomenon. Thence he proceeded to Cairo, and became a “Balik bash” (corporal), in charge of six Albanian privates, of Mohammed Ali’s body-guard. Ensued a campaign against the Mamluks in Upper Egypt, and his being present at the massacre of those miscreants in the citadel of Cairo — he confined his part in the affair to plundering from the Beys a “saddle richly mounted in silver gilt,” and a slave girl with trinkets and money. He married the captive, and was stationed for six months at Matariyah (Heliopolis), with the force preparing to march upon Meccah, under Tussun Pasha. Here he suffered from thieves, and shot by mistake his Bim Bashi or sergeant, who was engaged in the unwonted and dangerous exercise of prayer in the dark. The affair was compromised by the amiable young commander-in-chief, who paid the blood money amounting to some thousand piastres. On the 6th October, 1811, the army started for Suez, where eighteen vessels waited to convey them to Yambu’. Mahomet assisted at the capture of that port, and was fortunate enough to escape alive from the desperate action of Jadaydah.3 Rheumatism obliged him to return to Cairo, where he began by divorcing his wife for great levity of conduct. In the early part of 1814, Mahomet, inspired by the news of Mohammed Ali Pasha’s success in Al-Hijaz, joined a reinforcement of Albanians, travelled to Suez, touched at Yambu’ and at Jeddah, assisted at the siege and capture of Kunfudah, and was present at its recapture by the Wahhabis. Wounded, sick, harassed by the Badawin, and disgusted by his commanding officer, he determined to desert again, adding, as an excuse, “not that the step, on my part at least, had the character of a complete desertion, since I intended to join the main body of the army;” and to his mania for desertion we owe the following particulars concerning the city of Meccah.

“Exulting in my escape, my mind was in a state to receive very strong impressions, and I was much struck with all I saw upon entering the city; for though it is neither large nor beautiful in itself, there is something in it that is calculated to impress a sort of awe, and it was the hour of noon when everything is very silent, except the Muezzins calling from the minarets.

“The principal feature of the city is that celebrated sacred enclosure which is placed about the centre of it; it is a vast paved court with doorways opening into it from every side, and with a covered colonnade carried all round like a cloister, while in the midst of the open space stands the edifice called the Caaba, whose walls are entirely covered over on the outside with hangings of rich velvet,4 on which there are Arabic inscriptions embroidered in gold.

“Facing one of its angles (for this little edifice is of a square form),5 there is a well which is called the well Zemzem, of which the water is considered so peculiarly holy that some of it is even sent annually to the Sultan at Constantinople; and no person who comes to Meccah, whether on pilgrimage or for mere worldly considerations, ever fails both to drink of it and to use it in his ablutions, since it is supposed to wipe out the stain of all past transgressions.

“There is a stone also near the bottom of the building itself which all the visitants kiss as they pass round it, and the multitude of them has been so prodigious as to have worn the surface quite away.

“Quite detached, but fronting to the Caaba, stand four pavilions (corresponding to the four sects of the Mahometan religion), adapted for the pilgrims; and though the concourse had of late years been from time to time much interrupted, there arrived just when I came to Meccah two Caravans of them, one Asiatic and one from the African side, amounting to not less than about 40,000 persons, who all seemed to be full of reverence towards the holy place.6”

After commenting on the crowded state of the city, the lodging of pilgrims in tents and huts, or on the bare ground outside the walls,7 and the extravagant prices of provisions, Haji Mahomet proceeds with his description.

“Over and above the general ceremonies of the purification at the well, and of the kissing of the corner-stone,8 and of the walking round the Caaba a certain number of times in a devout manner, every one has also his own separate prayers to put up, and so to fulfil the conditions of his vow and the objects of his particular pilgrimage.”

We have then an account of the Mosq............