The road, station by station.

Jabal Thawr, four kilometres south of Mecca

The first move of the journey was in the wrong direction. The riders would search the road north, so the two men went south, and spent three nights in a cave on Jabal Thawr while the search passed close enough to hear. Abu Bakr whispered that a man had only to look down at his feet to see them. The answer he got is in the Qur'an: do not grieve, Allah is with us.

Trust did not stop the search party. It held while they passed.

Qur'an 9:40 · Sahih al-Bukhari

Qudayd, on the coastal plain

Up the coast from Mecca they stopped at the tent of a woman called Umm Ma'bad, who had nothing to offer travellers but a worn ewe the drought had dried out. He ﷺ asked her leave, passed his hand over the animal, and milked it until every vessel in the tent was full. When her husband came home she described the stranger feature by feature. Her description is the fullest portrait of him ﷺ that survives.

She had nothing to give, and she is remembered forever for giving it.

Al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak · Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat

The Qudayd valley, north of Umm Ma'bad's tent

A bounty of a hundred camels stood on each of their heads. Suraqah ibn Malik rode them down alone, and was close enough to hear recitation when his horse sank to its knees in the sand. He asked for amnesty and was given it, then spent the ride home turning other pursuers around. He was promised the bracelets of the Persian emperor. Decades later, under Umar, he wore them.

The man who rode out to end the journey was sent home guarding it.

Sahih al-Bukhari

Near Rabigh, where the ways part

At this crossroads the way north to Yathrib opened, and the commentators record that a verse came down here, to a man walking away from everything he had: the One who made the Qur'an your charge will bring you back to a place of return. He ﷺ did return, eight years later, at the head of ten thousand.

The road out carried a promise about the road back.

Qur'an 28:85, placed at al-Juhfah in the tafsir of al-Qurtubi and others

Three kilometres short of the city

The first thing he ﷺ did on arriving was not rest. At Quba, on the southern edge of the oasis, he stopped for days and built: a mosque, the first of this community, raised before he had a roof of his own. The Qur'an calls it the mosque founded on taqwa from the first day.

Arrival is not the end of a migration. Building is.

Qur'an 9:108

The city that took him in

Anas ibn Malik, ten years old that day, said it in one line: the day he entered Medina, everything in it was lit. The city came out to meet him, and the song its children are remembered singing from the rooftops, Tala' al-Badru 'Alayna, is still sung at arrivals fourteen centuries later. This is where the walk ends, at the mosque he built and the city that kept him.

You will arrive tired, on foot, the way the story says to.

Jami' al-Tirmidhi, from Anas ibn Malik