No explosion followed, but the most astonishing thing happened.

All at once, without any preliminary disturbance, the ground became white.

A perfect silence fell on the Haram and the city for perhaps half a mile on all sides of the sacred enclosure Haram and streets, roof-tops, squares all looked as if suddenly covered with deep snow.
This whiteness, however, was not snow, but was produced by the _ihrams_ of the pilgrims now coming wholly to view.
Instead of gazing down on the heads of the multitude--all bare heads, as the Prophet commands for pilgrims--the Legionaries now found themselves looking at their whole bodies.

Every pilgrim in sight had instantaneously fallen to the earth, on the gravel of the Haram, along the raised walks from the porticoes to the Ka'aba, on the marble tiling about the Ka'aba itself, even in the farthest visible streets.
The white-clad figures lay piled on each other in grotesque attitudes and heaps.

Even the stone tank at the north-west side of the Ka'aba, under the famous Myzab, or Golden Waterspout on the Ka'aba roof, was heaped full of them; and all round the sacred Zem Zem well they lay in silent windrows, reaped down by some silent, invisible force.
In the remote suburbs and out on the plain, the Legionaries' binoculars could still see a swarming of white figures; but all the immediate vicinity was now wholly silent, motionless.