[combat_boots]

The Ka’aba IS A ROCK. You can drape it gold and surround it in the feathers of now extinct birds, but it is a ROCK. There is no inscription. There are no commandments. It is a black rock.

Period.

[muawiyah]

It's not really a rock. There are some videos on the internet showing that there's a stone building there made out of hundreds of cut building stones. It's pretty simple on the inside, simple on the outside, and serves more to designate the center of the ceremonial grounds than anything else.

The "black" structure you see is essentially a TENT or a series of curtains hung from the top of the structure.

[combat_boots]

It should have been ‘surround with’

However, the gold is a dish and the feathers aren’t there, of course. Fabric and a structure are.

But the Ka’aba still drapes rock.

People flock to walk counterclockwise around said rock.
(I did not intend to rhyme. OK. I can chuckle now).

[SunkenCiv]

The structure is a stone cube of sorts, mostly solid masonry, with an exterior somewhat roughened by the passage of time. There is, or perhaps was, a stairway internal to the structure, beginning near one corner, and going up to the roof. There was a large, seated-buddha-lookin’ idol basically covering the top of the kaaba in Greek times and probably for some while thereafter.

I’m not too sure about that thing I posted above (the Hindu origin of the site), but the seven circuits of the kaaba made by pilgrims is indeed a pagan holdover or leftover, and the kaaba itself antedates the big old Mo by 1000 years or more. There are those who believe that the 40 years of wandering by the post-Exodus Hebrew tribes took place in Arabia, rather than in the Sinai and points east, and it’s possible that Mohammed (who was a plagiarist) or one of the anonymous editors that followed came up with the idea that Abraham built the kaaba. It’s unlikely that the Abrahamic origin is anything but a concocted bit of supporting myth.