MINA, Saudi Arabia - The 20-year-old American tells his hajj pilgrimage stories a mile a minute, his hands moving in excitement — about how he arrived in Mecca days ago, lost amid the massive crowds, and saw a man drop dead while circling the Kaaba.
"Dude, I saw it, the guy had the most peaceful smile on his face," Adil Muschelewicz, performing the pilgrimage for the first time, said Sunday, his head shaved bald after a ritual a day earlier.
The young man from Easley, S.C., had arrived alone in Mecca because of a travel agent screw-up that prevented his family from arriving for three days. He was with hundreds of thousands of others circling the Kaaba, the black stone cube that is Islam's holiest site, when he saw the elderly man fall dead. The body was quickly lifted out of the crowd.
Muschelewicz didn't know the cause of the man's death — exhaustion maybe, he said — but it became one of the many powerful religious moments that have shaken him during the trip.
"I looked at his face and I looked at the Kaaba, and it was like he was happy, he'd gotten close to God. It just went boom, like this deep bass line in my heart," he said. "It was so emotional. I was by myself, in this wild place I'd never been before."
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