Reply #18: I drank Magic Water once! [View All]

[onager]

I guess "Holy Water" would be a better term. When I was working in Saudi Arabia, during Ramadan once I had dinner with some Muslims at a hotel. This was during Eid al-Fitr, the last week of Ramadan with massive feasting.

One of the Big Deals at these festivities is drinking water from the Zamzam Well in Mecca. For those of you who don't keep up with the various mythologies, this is the well where the HANDMAID (shudder) Hagar and her baby son Ishmael were mir-a-cu-lously saved from dying of thirst by God/Allah/Max or whoever. For further details and the usual scholarly, well-founded historical account, see your local Buy-bull.

Since every pilgrim to Mecca is expected to drink from the well, for years various experts claimed that the real "miracle" was thousands of people NOT dying from its polluted water.

The Muslims got tired of hearing that, so the Saudis hired some whiz-bang scientific types to analyze the well and its water.

(You can see the irony coming, can't you?}

Turns out the source of the well is an underground desert spring that percolates up thru the sand. As I understand it, this acts as a sort of natural filter, so the water is allegedly perfectly safe to drink and cleaner than a lot of the water in any modern city.