[ʿAbd Allāh:] My father made five pilgrimages: three on foot and two riding. On some of them he spent only twenty dirhams. 59.1

[Ṣāliḥ:] I heard my father say, “I made five pilgrimages, three of them on foot. On one of them I spent only thirty dirhams.” 59.2

[Al-Marrūdhī:] Aḥmad once said to me, “Some people can make it from Mecca back to Baghdad on only fourteen dirhams.” 59.3

“Like who?” I asked.

“Me.” [ʿAbd Allāh:] In the anteroom of our house was a bench. When my father had a visitor he wanted to sit with privately, he would offer him a seat on the bench. With other callers, he would stand in the doorway with his hands on the doorposts and talk from there. One day a man came to the house and said, “Tell your father it’s Abū Ibrāhīm the Wanderer.” 59.4

The two of them sat down on the bench.

“Say hello to a great Muslim,” my father told me (or “one of the best of the Muslims”). So I said hello. Then my father said, “Talk to us, Abū Ibrāhīm.” “I was passing through Such-and-Such a place,” he said, “near the monastery there, when I got too sick to walk. I remember thinking that if I were closer to the monastery one of the monks might treat me. Suddenly a great lion appeared, walked up to me, and carried me along gently on its back until we reached the monastery, where it let me down. When the monks saw me arrive on the back of a lion, all four hundred of them embraced Islam.

“Now you talk to me, Abū ʿAbd Allāh!” “Four or five nights before the pilgrimage,” said my father, “I dreamed of the Prophet, God bless and keep him. He said, ‘Aḥmad, make the pilgrimage.’ Then I woke up. Whenever I prepare to travel, I put some crumbled bread in a bag. So I did that.

The next morning, I started for Kufa, and got there later the same day. In the Friday mosque, I met a handsome young man with a pleasant scent. I greeted him and then said ‘God is great’ to begin my prayer. When I finished I asked him whether anyone was still leaving for the pilgrimage. He told me to wait until one of his brethren came along. When he came, he turned out to be a man in the same situation as I was. As we walked along, he asked the young man if we would be carried.308

“‘If Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal is with us,’ said the young man, ‘then we will.’ “At that moment I realized that he was al-Khaḍir. Then I asked the man with me if he wanted something to eat.

“‘Go ahead and eat your sort of food,’ he said, ‘and I’ll eat mine.’ “Whenever we ate, the young man would disappear then return when we were done. Three days later we were in Mecca.”309