The Conflagration
But my kingdom was without subjects. None of my own crew had followed me. I saw the pirate vessels bearing downto complete the destruction of the fleet, and hailed them, but they all swept far wide of the trireme. The fire had taken too fast hold of her to make approach safe. I now began to feel my situation. The first sense of triumph was past, and I found myself deserted. The deed of devastation, meanwhile, was rapidly going on. I saw the Roman ships successively boarded, almost without resistance, and in a blaze. The conflagration rose in sheets and spires to the heavens, and colored the waters to an immeasurable extent with the deepest dye of gore. I heard the victorious shouts, and mine rose spontaneously along with them. In every vessel burned, in every torch flung, I rejoiced in a new blow to the tyrants of Judea. But my thoughts were soon fearfully brought home. The fire reached the cables; the trireme, plunging and tossing like a living creature in its last agony, burst away from her anchors; the wind was off the shore; a gust, strong as the blow of a battering-ram, struck her; and on the back of a huge wave she shot out to sea, a flying pyramid of fire.
The Solitary Voyager
Never was man more indifferent to the result than the solitary voyager of the burning trireme. What had life for me? I gazed round me. The element of fire reigned supreme. The shore—mountain, vale, and sand—was bright as day from the blaze of the tents and the floating fragments of the galleys. The heavens were an arch of angry splendor—every stooping cloud swept along reddened with the various dyes of the conflagration below. The sea was a rolling abyss of the fiercest color of slaughter. The blazing vessels, loosened from the shore, rushed madly before the storm, sheet and shroud shaking loose abroad like vast wings of flame.
At length all disappeared. The shore faded far into a dim line of light; the galleys sank or were consumed; the sea grew dark again. But the trireme, strongly built and of immense size, still fed the flame, and still shot on through the tempest, that fell on her the more furiously as she lost the cover of the land. The waves rose to a height that often baffled the wind, and left me floating in a strange calm between two black walls of water reaching to the clouds, and on whose smooth sides the image of the burning vessel was reflected as strongly as in a mirror. But the ascent to the summit of those fearful barriers again let in the storm in its rage. The tops of the billows were whirled off in sheets of foam; the wind tore mast and sail away, and the vessel was dashed forward like a stone discharged from an engine. I stood on the poop, which the spray and the wind kept clear of flame, and contemplated, with some feeling of the fierce grandeur of the spectacle, the fire rolling over the forward part of the vessel in a thousand shapes and folds.
While I was thus careering along, like the genius of fireupon his throne, I caught a glimpse of sails scattering in every direction before me—I had rushed into the middle of one of those small trading-fleets that coasted annually between the Euxine and the Nile. They flew, as if pursued by a fiend. But the same wind that bore them, bore me; and their screams, as the trireme bounded from billow to billow on their track, were audible even through the roarings of the storm. They gradually succeeded in spreading themselves so far that the contact with the flame must be partial. But on one, the largest and most crowded, the trireme bore inevitably down. The hunted ship tried every mode of escape in vain; it maneuvered with extraordinary skill; but the pursuer, lightened of every burden, rushed on like a messenger of vengeance.
The Sound of a Voice
I could distinctly see the confusion and misery of the crowd that covered the deck; men and women kneeling, weeping, fainting, or, in the fierce riot of despair, struggling for some wretched spoil that a few moments more must tear from all alike. But among the fearful mingling of sounds, one voice I suddenly heard that struck to my soul. It alone roused me from my stern scorn of human suffering. I no longer looked upon those beings as upon insects, that must be crushed in the revolution of the great wheel of fate. The heart, the living human heart, palpitated within me. I rushed to the side of the trireme, and with voice and hand made signals to the crew to take me on board. But at my call a cry of agony rang through the vessel. All fled to its farther part, but a few, who, unable to move, were seen on their knees, and in the attitudes of preternatural fear, imploring every power of heaven. Shocked by the consciousness that, even in the hour when mutual hazard softens the heart of man, I was an object of horror, I shrank back. I heard the voice once more, and once more resolving to get on board, flung a burning fragment over the side to help me through the waves.
“The solitary voyager of the burning trireme.”[see page 317.Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.
“The solitary voyager of the burning trireme.”
[see page 317.
Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.
But the time was past. The fragment had scarcely touched the foam when a sheet of lightning wrapped sea and sky; the flying vessel was gone. My eye looked but upon the wilderness of waters. The flash was fatal. It had struck the holdof my trireme, in which was stowed a large freightage of the bitumen and niter of the desert. A column of flame, white as silver, rose straight and steadily up to the clouds; and the huge ship, disparting timber by timber, reeled, heaved, and plunged headlong into the bosom of the ocean.
In a Whirlpool
I rose to the surface from a prodigious depth. I was nearly breathless. My limbs were wasted with famine and fatigue; but the tossing of the surges sustained and swept me on. The chill at last benumbed me, and my limbs were heavy as iron, when a broken mast rolling by entangled me in its cordage. It drove toward a point of land, round which the current swept. Strongly netted in the wreck, I was dragged along, sometimes above the billow, sometimes below. But a violent shock released me, and with a new terror I felt myself go down. I was engulfed in the whirlpool!
Every sensation was horribly vivid. I had the full consciousness of life and of the unfathomable depth into which I was descending. I heard the roar and rushing of the waters round me; the holding of my breath was torture; I strained, struggled, tossed out my arms, and grasped madly around, as if to catch something that might retard my hideous descent. My eyes were open. I never was less stunned by shock or fear. The solid darkness, the suffocation, the furious whirl of the eddy that spun me round its huge circle like an atom of sand—every sense of drowning—passed through my shattered frame with an individual and successive pang. I at last touched something, whether living or dead, fish or stone, I know not; but the impulse changed my direction, and I was darted up to the surface in a little bay sheltered by hills.
The storm had gone with the rapidity of the south. The sun burned bright and broad above my head; the pleasant breath of groves and flowery perfumes came on the waters; a distant sound of sweet voices lingered on the air. Like one roused from a frightful dream, I could scarcely believe that this was reality. But the rolling waters behind gave me sudden evidence. A billow, the last messenger of the storm, burst into the little bay, filled it to the brim with foam, andtossed me far forward. It rolled back, dragging with it the sedge and pebbles of the beach. I grasped the trunk of an olive, rough and firm as the rock itself. The retiring waves left me; I felt my way some paces among the trees, cast myself down, and, worn out with fatigue, had scarcely reached their shade when I fainted.
A Quiet Spot
I awoke in the decline of the day, as I could perceive by the yellow and orange hues that colored the thick branches above me. I was lying in a delicious recess, crowded with fruit-trees; my bed was the turf, but it was soft as down; a solitary nightingale above my head was sending forth snatches of that melody which night prolongs into the very voice of sweetness and sorrow; and a balmy air from the wild thyme and blossoms of the rose breathed soothingly even to the mind.
I had been thrown on one of the little isles that lie off Anthædon, a portion of the Philistine territory before it was won by our hero the Maccabee. The commerce which once filled the arm of the sea near Gaza had perished in the change of masters, and silence and seclusion reigned in a spot formerly echoing with the tumult of merchant and mariner. The little isle, the favorite retreat of the opulent Greek and Syrian traders in the overpowering heats of summer, and cultivated with the lavish expenditure of commercial wealth, now gave no proof of its ever having felt the foot of man, but in the spontaneous exuberance of flowers, once brought from every region of the East and West, and the exquisite fruits that still glowed on its slopes and dells.
A Refuge
In all things else Nature had resumed her rights; the gilded pavilions, the temples of Parian and Numidian stone, were in ruins, and buried under a carpet of roses and myrtles. The statues left but here and there a remnant of themselves, a lovely relic, wreathed over in fantastic spirals by the clematis and other climbing plants. The sculptured fountain let its waters loose over the ground, and the guardian genius that hung in marble beauty over the spring had long since resigned his charge and lay mutilated and discolored with the air and the dew. But the spring still gushed, boundingbright between the gray fissures of the cliff, and marking its course through the plain by the richer mazes of green.
To me, who was as weary of existence as ever was galley-slave, this spot of quiet loveliness had a tenfold power. My mind, like my body, longed for rest.
Through life I had walked in a thorny path; my ambition had winged a tempestuous atmosphere. Useless hazards, wild projects, bitter sufferings, were my portion. Those feelings in which alone I could be said to live had all been made inlets of pain. The love which nature and justice won from me to my family was perpetually thwarted by a chain of circumstances that made me a wretched, helpless, and solitary man. What then could I do better than abandon the idle hope of finding happiness among mankind; break off the trial, which must be prolonged only to my evil; and elude the fate that destined me to be an exile in the world? Yes, I would no longer be a man of suffering, in the presence of its happiness; a wretch stripped of an actual purpose, or a solid hope, in the midst of its activity and triumph; the abhorred example of a career miserable with defeated pursuit, and tantalized with expectations vain as the ripple on the stream!
In this stern resolve, gathering courage from despair—as the criminal on the scaffold scoffs at the world that rejects him—I determined to exclude recollection. The spot round me was henceforth to fill up the whole measure of my thoughts. Wife, children, friends, country, to me must exist no more. I imaged them in the tomb; I talked with them as shadows, as the graceful and lovely existences of ages past,—as hallowed memorials; but labored to divest them of the individual features that cling to the soul.
On the Shores of the Mediterranean
Lest this mystic repose should be disturbed by any of the sights of living man, I withdrew deeper into the shades which first sheltered me. It was enough for me that there was a canopy of leaves above to shield my limbs from the casual visitations of a sky whose sapphire looked scarcely capable of a stain, and that the turf was soft for my couch. Fruits sufficient to tempt the most luxurious taste were fallinground me, and the waters of the bright rivulet, scooped in the rind of citron and orange, were a draft that the epicure might envy. I was still utterly ignorant on what shore of the Mediterranean I was thrown, further than that the sun rose behind my bower and threw his western luster on the waveless expanse of sea that spread before it to the round horizon.
Salathiel’s Activity
But no man can be a philosopher against nature. With my strength the desire for exertion returned. My most voluptuous rest became irksome. Memory would not be restrained; the floodgates of thought opened once more, and to resist the passion for the world, I was driven to the drudgery of the hands. I gathered wood for the winter’s fuel, in the midst of days when the sun poured fire from the heavens; I attempted to build a hut, beside grottoes that a hermit would love; I trained trees and cultivated flowers where the soil threw out all that was rich in both with exhaustless prodigality.
Yet no expedient would appease the passion for the absorbing business of the world. My bower lost its enchantment; the delight of lying on beds of violet, and with my eyes fixed on the heavens, wandering away in rich illusion, palled upon me; the colors of the vision had grown dim. I no longer saw shapes of beauty winging their way through the celestial azure; I heard no harmonies of spirits on the midnight winds; I followed no longer the sun, rushing on his golden chariot-wheels to lands unstained by human step, or plunged with him at eve into the depths and ranged the secret wonders of ocean.
The Island Prison
Labor in its turn grew irksome. I began to reproach myself for the vulgar existence which occupied only the inferior portion of my nature; living only for food, sleep, and shelter, what was I better than the seals that basked on the shore at my feet? Night, too—that mysterious rest, interposed for purposes of such varied beneficence: to cool the brain, fevered by the bustle of the day; to soften mutual hostility, by a pause to which all alike must yield; to remind our forgetfulnature, by a perpetual semblance, of the time when all things must pass away, and be silent, and sleep; to sit in judgment on our hearts, and by a decision which no hypocrisy can disguise, anticipate the punishment of the villain, as it gives the man of virtue the foretaste of his reward—night began to exert its old influence over me; and with the strongest determination to think no more of what had been, I closed my eyes but to let in the past. I might have said that my true sleep was during the labors of the day, and my waking when I lay, with my senses sealed, upon my bed of leaves.
It is impossible to shut up the mind, and I at last abandoned the struggle. The spell of indolence once broken, I became as restless as an eagle in a cage. My first object was to discover on what corner of the land I was thrown. Nothing could be briefer than the circuit of my island, and nothing less explanatory. It was one of those little alluvial spots that grow round the first rock that catches the vegetation swept down by rivers. Ages had gone by, while reed was bound to reed and one bed of clay laid upon another. The ocean had thrown up its sands on the shore; the winds had sown tree and herb on the naked sides of the tall rock; the tree had drawn the cloud, and from its roots let loose the spring. Cities and empires had perished while this little island was forming into loveliness. Thus nature perpetually builds, while decay does its work with the pomp of man. From the shore I saw but a long line of yellow sand across a broad belt of blue waters. No sight on earth could less attract the eye or be less indicative of man.
Unanswered Signals
Yet within that sandy barrier what wild and wondrous acts might be doing, and to be done! My mind, with a pinion that no sorrow or bondage could tame, passed over the desert, and saw the battle, the siege, the bloody sedition, the long and heart-broken banishment, the fierce conflict of passions irrestrainable as the tempest, the melancholy ruin of my country by a judgment powerful as fate, and dreary and returnless as the grave! But the waters between me and that shore were an obstacle that no vigor of imagination could overcome. I was too feeble to attempt the passage by swimming.The opposite coast appeared to be uninhabited, and the few fishing-boats that passed lazily along this lifeless coast evidently shunned the island, as I conceived, from some hidden shoal. I felt myself a prisoner, and the thought irritated me. That ancient disturbance of my mind, which rendered it so keenly excitable, was born again; I felt its coming, and knew that my only resource was to escape from this circumscribing paradise that had become my dungeon. Day after day I paced the shore, awaking the echoes with my useless shouts, as each distant sail glided along close to the sandy line that was now to me the unattainable path of happiness. I made signals from the hill, but I might as well have summoned the vultures to stop as they flew screaming above my head to feed on the relics of the Syrian caravans.
What trifles can sometimes stand between man and enjoyment! Wisdom would have thanked Heaven for the hope of escaping the miseries of life in the little enchanted round, guarded by that entrenchment of waters, filled with every production that could delight the sense, and giving to the spirit, weary of all that the world could offer, the gentle retirement in which it could gather its remaining strength and make its peace with Heaven.
I was lying during a fiery noon on the edge of the island, looking toward the opposite coast, the only object on which I could now bear to look, when, in the stillness of the hour, I heard a strange mingling of distant sounds, yet so totally indistinct that, after long listening, I could conjecture it to be nothing but the rising of the surge. It died away. But it haunted me: I heard it in fancy. It followed me in the morn, the noon, and the twilight; in the hour of toil and in the hour when earth and heaven were soft and silent as an infant’s sleep—when the very spirit of tranquillity seemed to be folding his dewy wings over the world.
Wearied more with thought than with the daily toil that I imposed on myself for its cure, I had one night wandered to the shore, and lain down under the shelter of those thick woven boughs that scarcely let in the glimpses of the moon. The memory of all whom later chances brought in my pathpassed before me—the fate of my gallant kinsmen in Masada, of the wily Ishmaelite, of the pirate captain, of that unhappy crew whose danger was my involuntary deed, of my family scattered upon the face of the world. Arcturus, bending toward the horizon, told me that it was already midnight, when my reverie was broken by the same sounds that had once disturbed my day. But they now came full and distinct. I heard the crashing of heavy axles along the road, the measured tramp of cavalry, the calls of the clarion and trumpet. They seemed beside me. I started from my sand, but all around was still. I gazed across the waters; they were lying, like another sky, reflecting star for star with the blue immensity above—but on them was no living thing.
Salathiel Leaves His Shelter
I had heard of phantom armies traversing the air, but the sky was serene as crystal. I climbed the hill, upon whose summit I recollected to have seen the ruins of an altar; gathered the weeds, and lighted them for a beacon. The flame threw a wide and ruddy reflection on the waters and the sky. I watched by it until morn. But the sound had died as rapidly as it rose; and when, with the first pearly tinge of the east, the coast shaped itself beneath my eye, I saw with bitter disappointment but the same solitary shore. The idea of another day of suspense was intolerable; I returned to my place of refuge; gave it that glance of mingled feeling, without which perhaps no man leaves the shelter which he is never to see again; collected a few fruits for my sustenance, if I should reach the desert; and with a resolution to perish, if it so pleased Providence, but not to return, plunged into the sea.
The channel was even broader than I had calculated by the eye. My limbs were still enfeebled, but my determination was strength. I was swept by the current far from the opposite curve of the shore; yet its force spared mine, and after a long struggle I felt the ground under my feet. I was overjoyed, tho never was scene less fitted for joy. To the utmost verge of the view spread the sands, a sullen herbless waste, glowing like a sheet of brass in the almost vertical sun.
But I was on land! I had accomplished my purpose.Hope, the power of exertion, the chances of glorious future life, were before me. I was no longer a prisoner, within the borders of a spot which, for all the objects of manly existence, might as well have been my grave.
I journeyed on by sun and star in that direction which, to the Jew, is an instinct—to Jerusalem. Yet what fearful reverses, in this time of confusion, might not have occurred even there! What certainty could I have of being spared the bitterest losses, when sorrow and slaughter reigned through the land? Was I to be protected from the storm, that fell with such promiscuous fury upon all? I, too, the marked, the victim, the example to mankind! I looked wistfully back to the isle—that isle of oblivion.
The Robber Camp
While I was pacing the sand that actually scorched my feet, I heard a cry, and saw on a low range of sand-hills, at some distance, a figure making violent gestures. Friend or enemy, at least here was man, and I did not deeply care for the consequences, even of meeting man in his worst shape. Hunger and thirst might be more formidable enemies in the end; and I advanced toward the half-naked savage, who, however, ran from me, crying out louder than ever. I dragged my weary limbs after him, and at length reached the edge of a little dell in which stood a circle of tents. I had fallen among the robbers of the desert, but there was evident confusion in this fragment of a tribe. The camels were in the act of being loaded; men and women were gathering their household matters with the haste of terror; and dogs, sheep, camels, and children set up their voices in a general clamor.
Dreading that I might lose my only chance of refreshment and guidance, I cried out with all my might, and hastened down toward them; but the sight of me raised a universal scream, and every living thing took flight, the horsemen of the colony gallantly leading the way, with a speed that soon left the pedestrians far in the rear. But their invader conquered only for food. I entered the first of the deserted tents, and indulged myself with a full feast of bread, dry and rough as the sand on which it was baked, and of water, only less bitter than that through which I had swum. Still, all luxuryis relative. To me they were both delicious, and I thanked at once the good fortune which had provided so prodigally for those withered monarchs of the sands, and had invested my raggedness with the salutary terror that gave me the fruits of triumph without the toil.
A Girl’s Appearance
At the close of my feast, I uttered a few customary words of thanksgiving. A cry of joy rang in my ears; I looked round; saw, to my surprise, a bale of carpets walk forward from a corner of the tent, and heard a Jewish tongue imploring for life and freedom. I rapidly developed the speaker, and from this repulsive overture came forth one of the loveliest young females that I had ever seen. Her story was soon told. She was the granddaughter of Ananus,[41]the late high priest, one of the most distinguished of his nation for every lofty quality; but he had fallen on evil days. His resistance to faction sharpened the dagger against him, and he perished in one of the merciless feuds of the city. His only descendant was now before me; she had been sent to claim the protection of her relatives in the south of Judea. But her escort was dispersed by an attack of the Arabs, and in the division of the spoil the sheik of this little encampment obtained her as his share. The robber merchant was on his way to Cæsarea to sell his prize to the Roman governor, when my arrival put his caravan to the rout. To my inquiry into the cause of this singular success, the fair girl answered that the Arabs had taken me for a supernatural visitant, “probably come to claim some account of their proceedings in the late expedition.” They had been first startled by the blaze in the island, which by a tradition of the desert was said to be the dwelling of forbidden beings. My passage of the channel was seen, and increased the wonder; my daring to appear alone, among men whom mankind shunned, completed the belief of my more than mortal prowess, and the Arabs’ courage abandoned a contest in which “the least that could happen to them was to be swept into the surge, or tossed piecemeal upon the winds.”
The Sheik’s Shekels
To prevent the effects of their returning intrepidity, no time was to be lost in our escape. But the sun, which would havescorched anything but a lizard or a Bedouin to death, kept us prisoners until evening. We were actively employed in the mean time. The plunder of the horde was examined, with the curiosity that makes one of the indefeasible qualities of the fair in all climates; and the young Jewess had not been an inmate of the tent, nor possessed the brightest eyes among the daughters of women, for nothing. With an air between play and revenge, she hunted out every recess in which even the art of Arab thievery could dispose of its produce; and at length rooted up from a hole in the very darkest corner of the tent that precious deposit for which the sheik would have sacrificed all mankind, and even the last hair of his beard—a bag of shekels. She danced with exultation as she poured the shining contents on the ground before me.
“If ever Arab regretted his capture,” said she, “this most unlucky of sheiks shall have cause. But I shall teach him at least one virtue—repentance to the last hour of his life. I think that I see him at this moment frightened into a philosopher, and wishing from the bottom of his soul that he had, for once, resisted the temptation of his trade.”
“But what will you do with the money, my pretty teacher of virtue to Arabs?”
“Give it to my preserver,” said she, advancing, with a look suddenly changed from sportiveness to blushing timidity; “give it to him who was sent by Providence to rescue a daughter of Israel from the hands of the heathen.”
In the emotion of gratitude to me there was mingled a loftier feeling, never so lovely as in youth and woman; she threw up a single glance to heaven, and a tear of piety filled her sparkling eye.
“But, temptress and teacher at once,” said I, “by what right am I to seize on the sheik’s treasury? May it not diminish my supernatural dignity with the tribe to be known as a plunderer?”
“Ha!” said she, with a rosy smile; “who is to betray you but your accomplice? Besides, money is reputation and innocence, wisdom and virtue, all over the world.”
Touching, with the tip of one slender finger, my arm as itlay folded on my bosom, she waved the other hand, in attitudes of untaught persuasion.
A Maiden’s Philosophy
“Is it not true,” pleaded the pretty creature, “that next to a crime of our own is the being a party to the crime of others? Now, for what conceivable purpose could the Arab have collected this money? Not for food or clothing; for he can eat thistles with his own camel, and nature has furnished him with clothing as she has furnished the bear. The haik is only an encumbrance to his impenetrable skin. What, then, can he do with money but mischief, fit out new expeditions, and capture other fair maidens, who can not hope to find spirits, good or bad, for their protectors? If we leave him the means of evil, what is it but doing the evil ourselves? So,” concluded this resistless pleader, carefully gathering up the spoil and putting it into my hands, “I have gained my cause, and have now only to thank my most impartial judge for his patient hearing.”
There is a magic in woman. No man, not utterly degraded, can listen without delight to the accents of her guileless heart. Beauty, too, has a natural power over the mind, and it is right that this should be. All that overcomes selfishness—the besetting sin of the world—is an instrument of good. Beauty is but melody of a higher kind, and both alike soften the troubled and hard nature of man. Even if we looked on lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter. But as the companion of the mind, as the very model of a friendship that no chance can shake, as the pleasant sharer of the heart of heart, the being to whom man returns after the tumult of the day, like the worshiper to a secret shrine, to revive his nobler tastes and virtues at a source pure from the evil of the external world, where shall we find her equal, or what must be our feelings toward the mighty Disposer of earth, and all that inhabit it, but of admiration and gratitude for that disposal which thus combines our fondest happiness with our purest virtue?
END OF BOOK II.
The Philosopher’s Place
The evening came at last; the burning calm was followed by a breeze breathing of life, and on the sky sailed, as if it were wafted by that gentle breeze, the evening star. The lifeless silence of the desert now began to be broken by a variety of sounds, wild and sad enough in themselves, but softening by distance, and not ill suited to that declining hour which is so natural an emblem of the decline of life. The moaning of the shepherd’s horn; the low of the folding herds; the long, deep cry of the camel; even the scream of the vulture wheeling home from some recent wreck on the shore, and the howl of the jackal venturing out on the edge of dusk, came with no unpleasing melancholy upon the wind. We stood gazing impatiently from the tent door, at the west, that still glowed like a furnace of molten gold.
“Will that sun never go down?” I exclaimed. “We must wait his leisure, and he seems determined to tantalize us.”
“Yes; like a rich old man, determined to try the patience of his heirs, and more tenacious of his wealth the more his powers of enjoyment decay,” said the Jewess.
“Philosophy from those young lips! Yet the desert is the place for a philosopher.”
“That I deny,” said my sportive companion. “Philosophy is good for nothing where it has nothing to ridicule, and where it will be neither fed nor flattered. Its true place is the world, as much as the true place of yonder falcon is wherever it can find anything to pounce upon. Here your philosopher must labor for himself and laugh at himself—an indulgence in which he is the most temperate of men. In short, he is fit only for the idle, gay, ridiculous, and timid world. The desert is the soil for a much nobler plant. If you would train a poet into flower, set him here.”
“Or a plunderer.”
“No doubt. They are sometimes much the same.”
“Yet the desert produces nothing—but Arabs.”
“There are some minds, even among Arabs, and some of their rhapsodies are beauty itself. The very master of this tent, who fought and killed, I dare not say how many, to secure so precious a prize as myself, and who, after all his heroism, would have sold me into slavery for life, spent half his evenings sitting at this door chanting to every star of heaven, and riming, with tears in his eyes, to all kinds of tender remembrances.”
“But perhaps he was a genius, a heaven-born accident, and his merit was the more in being a genius in the midst of such a scene.”
“No—everything round us this hour is poetry. The silence—those broken sounds that make the silence more striking as they decay—those fiery continents of cloud, the empire of that greatest of sheiks, the sun, lord of the red desert of the air—the immeasurable desert below. Vastness, obscurity, and terror, the three spirits that work the profoundest wonders of the poet, are here in their native region. And now,” she said, with a look that showed there were other spells than poetry to be found in the desert, “to release you, I know, by signs infallible, that the sun is setting.”
I could not avoid laughing at the mimic wisdom with which she announced her discovery, and asked whence she had acquired the faculty of solving such rare problems.
A Daughter of the Desert
“Oh, by my incomparable knowledge of the stars.” She pointed to the eastern sky, on which they began to cluster in showers of diamond. “I have to thank the desert for it; and,” she added, with a slight submission of voice, “for everything. I am a daughter of the desert; the first sight that I saw was a camel; my early, my only accomplishments were to ride, sing Bedouin songs, tell Bedouin stories, and tame a young panther. But my history draws to a close. While I was supreme in the graces of a savage, had learned to sit a dromedary, throw the lance, make haiks, and gallop for a week together, love, resistless love, came in my way. Theson of a sheik, heir to a hundred quarrels and ten thousand sheep, goats, and horses, claimed me as his natural prey. I shrank from a husband even more accomplished than myself, and was meditating how to make my escape, whether into the wilderness or into the bottom of the sea, when a summons came which, or the money that came with it, the sheik found irresistible. And now my history is at an end.”
“And so,” said I, to provoke her to the rest of her narrative, “your story ends, as usual, with marriage. You, of course, finding that you had nothing to prevent your leaving the desert, took the female resolution of remaining in it, and as you might discard the young sheik at your pleasure, refused to have any other human being.”
“Can you think me capable of such a horror?”
She stamped her little foot in indignation on the ground; then turning on me with her flashing eye, penetrated the stratagem at once by my smile.
Naomi Continues Her Story
“Then hear the rest. I instantly mounted my dromedary, galloped for three days without sleep, and at length saw the towers of Jerusalem—glorious Jerusalem. I passed through crowds that seemed to me a gathering of the world; streets that astonished me with a thousand strange sights; and, overwhelmed with magnificence, delight, and fatigue, arrived at a palace, where I was met by a host of half-adoring domestics, and was led to the most venerable and beloved of wise and holy men, who caught me to his heart, called me his Naomi, his child, his hope, and shed tears and blessings on my head, as the sole survivor of his illustrious line.” She burst into tears.
The recollection of the good and heroic high priest was strong with us both, and in silence I suffered her sorrows to have their way. A faint echo of horns and voices roused me.
“Look to the hills!” I exclaimed, as I saw a long black line creeping, like a march of ants, down the side of a distant ridge of sand.
“Those are our Arabs,” said she, without a change of countenance. “They are, of course, coming to see what the angel, or demon, who visited them to-day has left in witness of hispresence. But from what I overheard of their terrors, no Arab will venture near the tents till night; night, the general veil of the iniquities of this amusing and very wicked world.”
“Yet how shall we traverse the sands on foot?”
“Forbid it, the spirit of romance,” said she. “I must see whether the gallantry of the sheik has not provided against that misfortune.”
She flew into the tent, and, drawing back a curtain, showed me two mares, of the most famous breed of Arabia.
The Spirited Steeds
“Here are the Koshlani,” said she, with playful malice dancing in her eyes; “I saw them brought in, in triumph, last night, stolen from the pastures of Achmet Ben Ali himself, first horse-stealer and prince of the Bedouins, who is doubtless by this time half dead of grief at the loss of the two gems of his stud. I heard the achievement told with great rejoicings, and a very curious specimen of dexterity it was. Come forth,” said she, leading out two beautiful animals, white as milk; “come forth, you two lovely orphans of the true breed of Solomon—princesses with pedigrees that put kings to shame, unless they can go back two thousand years; birds of the Bedouin, with wings to your feet, stars for eyes, and ten times the sense of your masters in your little tossing heads.”
She sprang upon her courser, and winded it with the delight of practised skill. The Arabs were now but a few miles off and in full gallop toward us. I urged her to ride away at once, but she continued curveting and maneuvering her spirited steed, that, enjoying the free air of the desert after having been shut up so long, threw up its red nostrils and bounded like a stag.
“A moment yet,” said she; “I have not quite done with the Arab. It is certainly bad treatment for his hospitality to have plundered him of his dinner, his money, and his horses.”
“And of his captive, a loss beyond all reparation.”
“I perfectly believe so,” was the laughing answer; “but I have been thinking of making him a reparation which any Arab on earth would think worth even my charms. I have been contriving how to make his fortune.”
“By returning his shekels?”
“Not a grain of them shall he ever see. No, he shall not have the sorrow to think that he entertained only a princess and a philosopher. As a spirit you came, and as a spirit you shall depart, and he shall have the honor of telling the tale. The national stories of such matters are worn out; he shall have a new one of his own, and every emir in the kingdoms of Ishmael—through the fiery sands of Ichama, the riverless mountains of Nejd; Hejaz, the country of flies and fools; and Yemen, the land of locusts, lawyers, and merchants, will rejoice to have him at his meal. Thus the man’s fortune is made, for there is no access to the heart like that of being necessary to the dinners and dulness of the mighty.”
“Or on the strength of the wonder,” said I, “he may make wonders of his own, turn charlatan of the first magnitude, profess to cure the incurable, and get solid gold for empty pretension; sell health to the epicure, gaiety to the old, and charms to the repulsive; defy the course of nature, and live like a prince upon the exhaustless revenue of human absurdity.”
The Blazing Tents
A cloud of smoke now wreathed up from the sheik’s tent; fire followed; and even while we looked on, the wind, carrying the burning fragments, set the whole camp in a blaze. The Arabs gave a universal shriek and fled back, scattering with gestures and cries of terror through the sands.
“There—there,” said my companion, clapping her delicate white palms in exultation; “let them beware of making women captives in future. In my final visit to the tent I put a firebrand into the very bundle of carpets in which I played the part of slave.”
“Not to be your representative, I presume.”
Forward!
“Yes, with only the distinction that in time I should have been much the more perilous of the two. If that unlucky sheik had dared to keep me a week longer in his detestable tent, I should have raised a rebellion in the tribe, dethroned him, and turned princess on my own account. As to burning him out, there was no remedy. But for those flames the tribe would have been upon our road. But for those flames wemight even have been mistaken for mere mortals; and your spirits always vanish as we do, in fire and smoke. How nobly those tents blaze! Now, forward!”
She gave the reins to her barb, flung a triumphant gesture toward the burning camp, and under cover of a huge sheet of fiery vapor we darted into the wilderness.
Our flight lay toward Masada. The stars were brilliant guides, and the coolness of the Arabian night, which forms so singular a contrast to the overpowering ardors of the day, relieved us from the chief obstacle of desert travel. At daybreak we reached a tract, whose broken and burnt-up ground showed that there had lately encamped the army the sound of whose march had startled my reveries in the island.
It was evening when I caught the glimpse of the fortress. My heart trembled at the sight. An impression of evil was upon me. Yet I must go on or die.
“There,” said I, “you see my home, and yours while you desire it. You will find friends delighted to receive you, and a protection that neither Roman nor Arab can insult. Heaven grant that all may be as when I left Masada!”
The fair girl gratefully thanked me.
Naomi’s Gratitude
“I have been long,” said she, “unused to kindness, and its voice overpowers me. But if the duty, the gratitude, the faithful devotedness of the orphan to her generous preserver can deserve protection, I shall yet have some claim. Suffer me to be your daughter.”
She bowed her head before me with filial reverence. I took the outstretched hand, that quivered in mine, and pressed it to my lips. The sacred compact was pledged in the sight of the stars. More formal treaties have been made, but few sincerer.
We rapidly advanced to the foot of the ridge that, now defining and extending, showed its well-known features in all their rugged grandeur. But to come within reach of the gates, I had still one of the huge buttresses of the mountain to go round. My companion, with the quick sympathy thatmakes one of the finest charms of women, already shared in my ominous fears, and rode by my side without a word. My eyes were fixed on the ground. I was roused by a clash of warlike music. The suspense was terribly at an end.