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romantic events and mysterious terrible suggestions; the tales of wonder and the supernatural, tenacious beliefs that abound through it strike such deep root and are so all-pervading and aweing, that the name of this East must always inspire a charm. Another life— a phantom-life-seems to us as the watch and witness of all Oriental occurrences. Unseen guardians still walk amidst its ruined citadels and abandoned cities. And its crumbling monuments, by man forsaken, are sentinelled by other and higher intelligences. Buried treasures of incalculable value, and genii-guarded stores of the richest; also accumulations of gems and spoil of fabulous character and surprises to an unbelievable extent, are supposed to be still scattered— for ever lost, or almost hopelessly so, to the curiosity of man. And these are distributed over all the ancient kingdoms of Asia, and even over those old realms whose existence, though true, has nearly been melted up as into the disbelief of them of history.

And the traditions of the shadowy beings who guard and warn-off seekers from these occult heaps-this wealth of glorious material things-are overpowering and cogent in almost all corners of the Vast East.

Every ruin in the East has its Spirit. But the Desert is the place to which the apparitions of the whole earth are supposed to be relegated.

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But, in a field where of necessity we are so much limited, we willingly pass from the consideration of these treasure or khasne phantoms (which alone sufficiently insure a swarm of ghostly terrors for all Oriental ruins of cities) to the same marvellous apparitions, as they haunt other solitudes even more awful than those of ruined cities. In this world there are two mighty forms of perfect solitude-the ocean and the desert: the wilderness of the barren sands, and the wilderness of the barren waters. Both are the parents of inevitable superstitions-of terrors, solemn, ineradicable, eternal. Sailors and the children of the desert are alike overrun with spiritual hauntings, from accidents of peril essentially connected with those

DANGERS IN THE DESERT

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modes of life, and from the eternal spectacle of the infinite. Voices seem to blend with the raving of the sea, which will for ever impress the feeling of beings more than human, and every chamber of the great wilderness which, with little interruption, stretches from the Euphrates to the western shores of Africa, has its own peculiar terrors both as to sights and sounds. In the wilderness of Zin, between Palestine and the Red Sea, a section of the desert well known in these days to our own countrymen, bells are heard daily pealing for matins, or for vespers, from some phantomconvent that no search of Christian or of Bedouin Arab has ever been able to discover. These bells have sounded since the Crusades.

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"Other sounds, trumpets, the Alala of armies, &c., are heard in other regions of the Desert. Forms, also, are seen of more people than have any right to be walking in human paths; sometimes forms of avowed terror; sometimes, which is a case of far more danger, appearances that mimic the shapes of men, and even of friends or comrades. This is a case much dwelt on by the old travellers, and which throws a gloom over the spirits of all Bedouins, and of every cafila or caraWe all know what a sensation of loneliness or 'eeriness' (to use an expressive term of the ballad poetry) arises to any small party assembling in a single room of a vast desolate mansion: how the timid among them fancy continually that they hear some remote door opening, or trace the sound of suppressed footsteps from some distant staircase. Such is the feeling in the desert even in the midst of the caravan. The mighty solitude is seen, the dread silence is anticipated which will succeed to this brief transit of men, camels, and horses. Awe prevails even in the midst of society; but if the traveller should loiter behind from fatigue, or be so imprudent as to ramble aside-should he, from any cause, once lose sight of his party, it is held that his chance is small of recovering their traces. And why? Not chiefly from the want of footmarks, where the wind effaces all impressions in half-an-hour, or of

eyemarks, where all is one blank ocean of sand, but much more from the sounds or the visual appearances which are supposed to beset and to seduce all insulated wanderers."

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Byzantine Crucifix worn over his white kirtle by the Knight, Gomer de Tedesco.

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FTER three days' further fearful journeying, buried in the heart of the desert but spreading as it were a green carpet in the midst of the terrific waste, Dent D'Airain and his chivalric company found a large oasis, in the midst of which rose pleasantly the spiry, dome-covered towers of a Greek Monastery, very beautiful to see and a great surprise.

Here, when their approach was descried from the building, a train of monks with Alexius their abbot at their head issued out to meet them. They came up with skins of water and hospitable provender to refresh. And the bells of the holy house-strange sounds in the desert-were heard to toll, as with the benevolently hospitable welcome, and with many a priestly benediction the armed company were admitted within the monastery and cheered with wine and good food. They were also invited to unarm and lie down to rest.

"We will deck thy sacred walls with our steel clothing, reverend Father Alexius," said the leader D'Airain. "And our horses and camels shall we stall in thy columned cloisters and beside thy beautiful Gothic-work fountains. And there shall arrive peace to our hearts and sleep to our eyes during these fierce hours of daylight-heat. But we shall pray your pardon if we, jealous knights, in our never-omitted soldierly practice, place guards not only over ourselves but over the arms

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whereof we have so gladly disburthened, and which stand piled in thy great hot court. And this damsel of princely descent and her women although no Christians-in all honour do we hand to your keeping. And as we have store of wealth we shall bestow of it and win your well-wishing-even your hearty thankful farewell." This was spoken by Dent D'Airain when he had dismounted from his horse.

"So be it all, my son," said the Father Alexius. And he departed into his oratory to confer with his SubPriors Apollinaris and Umbre. This upon points needful apparently for the accommodation of his guests.

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"Triforium of the Monastery, with its quaint pillars and sculpture-afterwards buried in sand."

When the Father Alexius and his subordinates Apollinaris and Umbre entered the rich oratory, decorated with gold and precious stones-even in the desert-the Father Alexius closed carefully the doors and went and sat in his chair of state. He turned to Umbre, who sat deeply thinking

"Devise something in thy keen wisdom, Brother Umbre. Thine ingenuity hath before this helped us well. Half of the gold and precious things in our penetralia is of thy indirect getting. As half of the anatomies of men hung up as curious memorials in our crypt is of thy indirect placing. This desert-road hath at bye-times been as a road of Mammon-paven hither

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