Hira Cave, Mount of Light

This guide to Hira Cave, on the Mountain of Light above Mecca, follows the climb of over seventeen hundred steps to the small cave where a forty-year-old merchant named Muhammad had spent years in solitary retreat, seeking a quiet the trading city below couldn't offer. It sets up the night in Ramadan in the year six hundred ten that would end that private ritual for good, and the role his wife Khadija played once he came down the mountain shaking. Stand at the entrance, cool and barely wide enough for six, where generations of pilgrims have paused to imagine that night.