The black granite Ka’ba, the cubical structure that stands as the
holiest center of Islam, features at its eastern vertex a small black
stone about the size of a grapefruit, the al-hajar al-aswad,
which may or may not have fallen to earth in the time of Adam and Eve.
Supported in a silver frame, this obsidian-like cipher structures space
for some billion Muslims, standing as it does at the culminating point
known as the qibla—the direction to which devout followers of
Mohammed address their five daily obeisances. Tradition has it that the
rock was once snowy white, and has darkened over time through exposure
to human sin.
A snowy white stone that gives shape to the universe: as it happens, we
all carry within our skulls the vestige of such a thing, a kind of
existentially reversed qibla
(this one perspectival, the other metaphysical) that gives us our sense
of being at the center of things, the sense that we are upright at the
origin point of a three-dimensional space. The “otolithic organs,” as
they are known, are a pair of sensors—the utricle and the
saccule—nestled in the labyrinthine architecture of the inner ear.