The Talisman

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The Eastern warrior, raising himself in his stirrups, and shaking
aloft his lance, replied, "Hardly, I fear, shall I find one with
a crossed shoulder who will exchange with me the cast of the
jerrid."

"I will not promise for that," replied the Knight; "though there
be in the camp certain Spaniards, who have right good skill in
your Eastern game of hurling the javelin."

"Dogs, and sons of dogs!" ejaculated the Saracen; "what have
these Spaniards to do to come hither to combat the true
believers, who, in their own land, are their lords and
taskmasters? with them I would mix in no warlike pastime."

"Let not the knights of Leon or Asturias hear you speak thus of
them," said the Knight of the Leopard. " But," added he, smiling
at the recollection of the morning's combat, "if, instead of a
reed, you were inclined to stand the cast of a battle-axe, there
are enough of Western warriors who would gratify your longing."

"By the beard of my father, sir," said the Saracen, with an
approach to laughter, "the game is too rough for mere sport. I
will never shun them in battle, but my head" (pressing his hand
to his brow) "will not, for a while, permit me to seek them in
sport."

"I would you saw the axe of King Richard," answered the Western
warrior, "to which that which hangs at my saddle-bow weighs but
as a feather."

"We hear much of that island sovereign," said the Saracen. "Art
thou one of his subjects?"

"One of his followers I am, for this expedition," answered the
Knight, "and honoured in the service; but not born his subject,
although a native of the island in which he reigns."

"How mean you? " said the Eastern soldier; "have you then two
kings in one poor island?"

"As thou sayest," said the Scot, for such was Sir Kenneth by
birth. "It is even so; and yet, although the inhabitants of the
two extremities of that island are engaged in frequent war, the
country can, as thou seest, furnish forth such a body of men-at-arms as may go far to shake the unholy hold
which your master
hath laid on the cities of Zion."

"By the beard of Saladin, Nazarene, but that it is a thoughtless
and boyish folly, I could laugh at the simplicity of your great
Sultan, who comes hither to make conquests of deserts and rocks,
and dispute the possession of them with those who have tenfold
numbers at command, while he leaves a part of his narrow islet,
in which he was born a sovereign, to the dominion of another
sceptre than his. Surely, Sir Kenneth, you and the other good
men of your country should have submitted yourselves to the
dominion of this King Richard ere you left your native land,
divided against itself, to set forth on this expedition?"

Hasty and fierce was Kenneth's answer. "No, by the bright light
of Heaven! If the King of England had not set forth to the
Crusade till he was sovereign of Scotland, the Crescent might,
for me, and all true-hearted Scots, glimmer for ever on the walls
of Zion."

Thus far he had proceeded, when, suddenly recollecting himself,
he muttered, "MEA CULPA! MEA CULPA! what have I, a soldier of
the Cross, to do with recollection of war betwixt Christian
nations!"

The rapid expression of feeling corrected by the dictates of duty
did not escape the Moslem, who, if he did not entirely understand
all which it conveyed, saw enough to convince him with the
assurance that Christians, as well as Moslemah, had private
feelings of personal pique, and national quarrels, which were not
entirely reconcilable. But the Saracens were a race, polished,
perhaps, to the utmost extent which their religion permitted, and
particularly capable of entertaining high ideas of courtesy and
politeness; and such sentiments prevented his taking any notice
of the inconsistency of Sir Kenneth's feelings in the opposite
characters of a Scot and a Crusader.

Meanwhile, as they advanced, the scene began to change around
them. They were now turning to the eastward, and had reached the
range of steep and barren hills which binds in that quarter the
naked plain, and varies the surface of the country, without
changing its sterile character. Sharp, rocky eminences began to
rise around them, and, in a short time, deep declivities and
ascents, both formidable in height and difficult from the
narrowness of the path, offered to the travellers obstacles of a
different kind from those with which they had recently contended.

Dark caverns and chasms amongst the rocks--those grottoes so
often alluded to in Scripture--yawned fearfully on either side as
they proceeded, and the Scottish knight was informed by the Emir
that these were often the refuge of beasts of prey, or of men
still more ferocious, who, driven to desperation by the constant
war, and the oppression exercised by the soldiery, as well of the
Cross as of the Crescent, had become robbers, and spared neither
rank nor religion, neither sex nor age, in their depredations.

The Scottish knight listened with indifference to the accounts of
ravages committed by wild beasts or wicked men, secure as he felt
himself in his own valour and personal strength; but he was
struck with mysterious dread when he recollected that he was now
in the awful wilderness of the forty days' fast, and the scene of
the actual personal temptation, wherewith the Evil Principle was
permitted to assail the Son of Man. He withdrew his attention
gradually from the light and worldly conversation of the infidel
warrior beside him, and, however acceptable his gay and gallant
bravery would have rendered him as a companion elsewhere, Sir
Kenneth felt as if, in those wildernesses the waste and dry
places in which the foul spirits were wont to wander when
expelled the mortals whose forms they possessed, a bare-footed
friar would have been a better associate than the gay but
unbelieving paynim.

These feelings embarrassed him the rather that the Saracen's
spirits appeared to rise with the journey, and because the
farther he penetrated into the gloomy recesses of the mountains,
the lighter became his conversation, and when he found that
unanswered, the louder grew his song. Sir Kenneth knew enough of
the Eastern languages to be assured that he chanted sonnets of
love, containing all the glowing praises of beauty in which the
Oriental poets are so fond of luxuriating, and which, therefore,
were peculiarly unfitted for a serious or devotional strain of
thought, the feeling best becoming the Wilderness of the
Temptation. With inconsistency enough, the Saracen also sung
lays in praise of wine, the liquid ruby of the Persian poets; and
his gaiety at length became so unsuitable to the Christian
knight's contrary train of sentiments, as, but for the promise of
amity which they had exchanged, would most likely have made Sir
Kenneth take measures to change his note. As it was, the
Crusader felt as if he had by his side some gay, licentious
fiend, who endeavoured to ensnare his soul, and endanger his
immortal salvation, by inspiring loose thoughts of earthly
pleasure, and thus polluting his devotion, at a time when his
faith as a Christian and his vow as a pilgrim called on him for a
serious and penitential state of mind. He was thus greatly
perplexed, and undecided how to act; and it was in a tone of
hasty displeasure that, at length breaking silence, he
interrupted the lay of the celebrated Rudpiki, in which he
prefers the mole on his mistress's bosom to all the wealth of
Bokhara and Samarcand.

"Saracen," said the Crusader sternly, "blinded as thou art, and
plunged amidst the errors of a false law, thou shouldst yet
comprehend that there are some places more holy than others, and
that there are some scenes also in which the Evil One hath more
than ordinary power over sinful mortals. I will not tell thee
for what awful reason this place--these rocks--these caverns with
their gloomy arches, leading as it were to the central abyss--are
held an especial haunt of Satan and his angels. It is enough
that I have been long warned to beware of this place by wise and
holy men, to whom the qualities of the unholy region are well
known. Wherefore, Saracen, forbear thy foolish and ill-timed
levity, and turn thy thoughts to things more suited to the spot
--although, alas for thee! thy best prayers are but as blasphemy
and sin."

The Saracen listened with some surprise, and then replied, with
good-humour and gaiety, only so far repressed as courtesy
required, "Good Sir Kenneth, methinks you deal unequally by your
companion, or else ceremony is but indifferently taught amongst
your Western tribes. I took no offence when I saw you gorge
hog's flesh and drink wine, and permitted you to enjoy a treat
which you called your Christian liberty, only pitying in my heart
your foul pastimes. Wherefore, then, shouldst thou take scandal,
because I cheer, to the best of my power, a gloomy road with a
cheerful verse? What saith the poet, 'Song is like the dews of

heaven on the bosom of the desert; it cools the path of the
traveller.'"

"Friend Saracen," said the Christian, "I blame not the love of
minstrelsy and of the GAI SCIENCE; albeit, we yield unto it even
too much room in our thoughts when they should be bent on better
things. But prayers and holy psalms are better fitting than LAIS
of love, or of wine-cups, when men walk in this Valley of the
Shadow of Death, full of fiends and demons, whom the prayers of
holy men have driven forth from the haunts of humanity to wander
amidst scenes as accursed as themselves."

"Speak not thus of the Genii, Christian," answered the Saracen,
"for know thou speakest to one whose line and nation drew their
origin from the immortal race which your sect fear and
blaspheme."

"I well thought," answered the Crusader, "that your blinded race
had their descent from the foul fiend, without whose aid you
would never have been able to maintain this blessed land of
Palestine against so many valiant soldiers of God. I speak not
thus of thee in particular, Saracen, but generally of thy people
and religion. Strange is it to me, however, not that you should
have the descent from the Evil One, but that you should boast of
it."

"From whom should the bravest boast of descending, saving from
him that is bravest?" said the Saracen; "from whom should the
proudest trace their line so well as from the Dark Spirit, which
would rather fall headlong by force than bend the knee by his
will? Eblis may be hated, stranger, but he must be feared; and
such as Eblis are his descendants of Kurdistan."

Tales of magic and of necromancy were the learning of the period,
and Sir Kenneth heard his companion's confession of diabolical
descent without any disbelief, and without much wonder; yet not
without a secret shudder at finding himself in this fearful
place, in the company of one who avouched himself to belong to
such a lineage. Naturally insusceptible, however, of fear, he
crossed himself, and stoutly demanded of the Saracen an account
of the pedigree which he had boasted. The latter readily
complied.

"Know, brave stranger," he said, "that when the cruel Zohauk, one
of the descendants of Giamschid, held the throne of Persia, he
formed a league with the Powers of Darkness, amidst the secret
vaults of Istakhar, vaults which the hands of the elementary
spirits had hewn out of the living rock long before Adam himself
had an existence. Here he fed, with daily oblations of human
blood, two devouring serpents, which had become, according to the
poets, a part of himself, and to sustain whom he levied a tax of
daily human sacrifices, till the exhausted patience of his
subjects caused some to raise up the scimitar of resistance, like
the valiant Blacksmith and the victorious Feridoun, by whom the
tyrant was at length dethroned, and imprisoned for ever in the
dismal caverns of the mountain Damavend. But ere that
deliverance had taken place, and whilst the power of the
bloodthirsty tyrant was at its height, the band of ravening
slaves whom he had sent forth to purvey victims for his daily
sacrifice brought to the vaults of the palace of Istakhar seven
sisters so beautiful that they seemed seven houris. These seven
maidens were the daughters of a sage, who had no treasures save
those beauties and his own wisdom. The last was not sufficient
to foresee this misfortune, the former seemed ineffectual to
prevent it. The eldest exceeded not her twentieth year, the
youngest had scarce attained her thirteenth; and so like were
they to each other that they could not have been distinguished
but for the difference of height, in which they gradually rose in
easy gradation above each other, like the ascent which leads to
the gates of Paradise. So lovely were these seven sisters when
they stood in the darksome vault, disrobed of all clothing saving
a cymar of white silk, that their charms moved the hearts of
those who were not mortal. Thunder muttered, the earth shook,
the wall of the vault was rent, and at the chasm entered one
dressed like a hunter, with bow and shafts, and followed by six
others, his brethren. They were tall men, and, though dark, yet
comely to behold; but their eyes had more the glare of those of
the dead than the light which lives under the eyelids of the
living. 'Zeineb,' said the leader of the band--and as he spoke
he took the eldest sister by the hand, and his voice was soft,
low, and melancholy--'I am Cothrob, king of the subterranean
world, and supreme chief of Ginnistan. I and my brethren are of
those who, created out of the pure elementary fire, disdained,
even at the command of Omnipotence, to do homage to a clod of
earth, because it was called Man. Thou mayest have heard of us
as cruel, unrelenting, and persecuting. It is false. We are by
nature kind and generous; only vengeful when insulted, only cruel
when affronted. We are true to those who trust us; and we have
heard the invocations of thy father, the sage Mithrasp, who
wisely worships not alone the Origin of Good, but that which is
called the Source of Evil. You and your sisters are on the eve
of death; but let each give to us one hair from your fair
tresses, in token of fealty, and we will carry you many miles
from hence to a place of safety, where you may bid defiance to
Zohauk and his ministers.' The fear of instant death, saith the
poet, is like the rod of the prophet Haroun, which devoured all
other rods when transformed into snakes before the King of
Pharaoh; and the daughters of the Persian sage were less apt than
others to be afraid of the addresses of a spirit. They gave the
tribute which Cothrob demanded, and in an instant the sisters
were transported to an enchanted castle on the mountains of
Tugrut, in Kurdistan, and were never again seen by mortal eye.
But in process of time seven youths, distinguished in the war and
in the chase, appeared in the environs of the castle of the
demons. They were darker, taller, fiercer, and more resolute
than any of the scattered inhabitants of the valleys of
Kurdistan; and they took to themselves wives, and became fathers
of the seven tribes of the Kurdmans, whose valour is known
throughout the universe."

The Christian knight heard with wonder the wild tale, of which
Kurdistan still possesses the traces, and, after a moment's
thought, replied, "Verily, Sir Knight, you have spoken well
--your genealogy may be dreaded and hated, but it cannot be
contemned. Neither do I any longer wonder at your obstinacy in a
false faith, since, doubtless, it is part of the fiendish
disposition which hath descended from your ancestors, those
infernal huntsmen, as you have described them, to love falsehood
rather than truth; and I no longer marvel that your spirits
become high and exalted, and vent themselves in verse and in
tunes, when you approach to the places encumbered by the haunting
of evil spirits, which must excite in you that joyous feeling
which others experience when approaching the land of their human
ancestry."

"By my father's beard, I think thou hast the right," said the
Saracen, rather amused than offended by the freedom with which
the Christian had uttered his reflections; "for, though the
Prophet (blessed be his name!) hath sown amongst us the seed of a
better faith than our ancestors learned in the ghostly halls of
Tugrut, yet we are not willing, like other Moslemah, to pass
hasty doom on the lofty and powerful elementary spirits from whom
we claim our origin. These Genii, according to our belief and
hope, are not altogether reprobate, but are still in the way of
probation, and may hereafter be punished or rewarded. Leave we
this to the mollahs and the imaums. Enough that with us the
reverence for these spirits is not altogether effaced by what we
have learned from the Koran, and that many of us still sing, in
memorial of our fathers' more ancient faith, such verses as
these."

So saying, he proceeded to chant verses, very ancient in the
language and structure, which some have thought derive their
source from the worshippers of Arimanes, the Evil Principle.

AHRIMAN.

Dark Ahriman, whom Irak still
Holds origin of woe and ill!
When, bending at thy shrine,
We view the world with troubled eye,
Where see we 'neath the extended sky,
An empire matching thine!

If the Benigner Power can yield
A fountain in the desert field,
Where weary pilgrims drink;
Thine are the waves that lash the rock,
Thine the tornado's deadly shock,
Where countless navies sink!

Or if he bid the soil dispense
Balsams to cheer the sinking sense,
How few can they deliver
From lingering pains, or pang intense,
Red Fever, spotted Pestilence,
The arrows of thy quiver!

Chief in Man's bosom sits thy sway,
And frequent, while in words we pray
Before another throne,
Whate'er of specious form be there,
The secret meaning of the prayer
Is, Ahriman, thine own.

Say, hast thou feeling, sense, and form,
Thunder thy voice, thy garments storm,
As Eastern Magi say;
With sentient soul of hate and wrath,
And wings to sweep thy deadly path,
And fangs to tear thy prey?

Or art thou mix'd in Nature's source,
An ever-operating force,
Converting good to ill;
An evil principle innate,
Contending with our better fate,
And, oh! victorious still?

Howe'er it be, dispute is vain.
On all without thou hold'st thy reign,
Nor less on all within;
Each mortal passion's fierce career,
Love, hate, ambition, joy, and fear,
Thou goadest into sin.

Whene'er a sunny gleam appears,
To brighten up our vale of tears,
Thou art not distant far;
'Mid such brief solace of our lives,
Thou whett'st our very banquet-knives
To tools of death and war.

Thus, from the moment of our birth,
Long as we linger on the earth,
Thou rulest the fate of men;
Thine are the pangs of life's last hour,
And--who dare answer?--is thy power,
Dark Spirit! ended THEN?

[The worthy and learned clergyman by whom this species of hymn
has been translated desires, that, for fear of misconception, we
should warn the reader to recollect that it is composed by a
heathen, to whom the real causes of moral and physical evil are
unknown, and who views their predominance in the system of the
universe as all must view that appalling fact who have not the
benefit of the Christian revelation. On our own part, we beg to
add, that we understand the style of the translator is more
paraphrastic than can be approved by those who are acquainted
with the singularly curious original. The translator seems to
have despaired of rendering into English verse the flights of
Oriental poetry; and, possibly, like many learned and ingenious
men, finding it impossible to discover the sense of the original,
he may have tacitly substituted his own.]

These verses may perhaps have been the not unnatural effusion of
some half-enlightened philosopher, who, in the fabled deity,
Arimanes, saw but the prevalence of moral and physical evil; but
in the ears of Sir Kenneth of the Leopard they had a different
effect, and, sung as they were by one who had just boasted
himself a descendant of demons, sounded very like an address of
worship to the arch-fiend himself. He weighed within himself
whether, on hearing such blasphemy in the very desert where Satan
had stood rebuked for demanding homage, taking an abrupt leave of
the Saracen was sufficient to testify his abhorrence; or whether
he was not rather constrained by his vow as a Crusader to defy
the infidel to combat on the spot, and leave him food for the
beasts of the wilderness, when his attention was suddenly caught
by an unexpected apparition.

The light was now verging low, yet served the knight still to
discern that they two were no longer alone in the desert, but
were closely watched by a figure of great height and very thin,
which skipped over rocks and bushes with so much agility as,
added to the wild and hirsute appearance of the individual,
reminded him of the fauns and silvans, whose images he had seen
in the ancient temples of Rome. As the single-hearted
Scottishman had never for a moment doubted these gods of the
ancient Gentiles to be actually devils, so he now hesitated not
to believe that the blasphemous hymn of the Saracen had raised
up an infernal spirit.

"But what recks it?" said stout Sir Kenneth to himself; "down
with the fiend and his worshippers!"

He did not, however, think it necessary to give the same warning
of defiance to two enemies as he would unquestionably have
afforded to one. His hand was upon his mace, and perhaps the
unwary Saracen would have been paid for his Persian poetry by
having his brains dashed out on the spot, without any reason
assigned for it; but the Scottish Knight was spared from
committing what would have been a sore blot in his shield of
arms. The apparition, on which his eyes had been fixed for some
time, had at first appeared to dog their path by concealing
itself behind rocks and shrubs, using those advantages of the
ground with great address, and surmounting its irregularities
with surprising agility. At length, just as the Saracen paused
in his song, the figure, which was that of a tall man clothed in
goat-skins, sprung into the midst of the path, and seized a rein
of the Saracen's bridle in either hand, confronting thus and
bearing back the noble horse, which, unable to endure the manner
in which this sudden assailant pressed the long-armed bit, and
the severe curb, which, according to the Eastern fashion, was a
solid ring of iron, reared upright, and finally fell backwards on
his master, who, however, avoided the peril of the fall by
lightly throwing himself to one side.

The assailant then shifted his grasp from the bridle of the horse
to the throat of the rider, flung himself above the struggling
Saracen, and, despite of his youth and activity kept him
undermost, wreathing his long arms above those of his prisoner,
who called out angrily, and yet half-laughing at the same time
--"Hamako--fool--unloose me--this passes thy privilege--unloose
me, or I will use my dagger."

"Thy dagger!--infidel dog!" said the figure in the goat-skins,
"hold it in thy gripe if thou canst!" and in an instant he
wrenched the Saracen's weapon out of its owner's hand, and
brandished it over his head.

"Help, Nazarene!" cried Sheerkohf, now seriously alarmed; "help,
or the Hamako will slay me."

"Slay thee!" replied the dweller of the desert; "and well hast
thou merited death, for singing thy blasphemous hymns, not only
to the praise of thy false prophet, who is the foul fiend's
harbinger, but to that of the Author of Evil himself."

The Christian Knight had hitherto looked on as one stupefied, so
strangely had this rencontre contradicted, in its progress and
event, all that he had previously conjectured. He felt, however,
at length, that it touched his honour to interfere in behalf of
his discomfited companion, and therefore addressed himself to the
victorious figure in the goat-skins.

"Whosoe'er thou art," he said, "and whether of good or of evil,
know that I am sworn for the time to be true companion to the
Saracen whom thou holdest under thee; therefore, I pray thee to
let him arise, else I will do battle with thee in his behalf."

"And a proper quarrel it were," answered the Hamako, "for a
Crusader to do battle in--for the sake of an unbaptized dog, to
combat one of his own holy faith! Art thou come forth to the
wilderness to fight for the Crescent against the Cross? A goodly
soldier of God art thou to listen to those who sing the praises
of Satan!"

Yet, while he spoke thus, he arose himself, and, suffering the
Saracen to rise also, returned him his cangiar, or poniard.

"Thou seest to what a point of peril thy presumption hath brought
thee," continued he of the goat-skins, now addressing Sheerkohf,
"and by what weak means thy practised skill and boasted agility
can be foiled, when such is Heaven's pleasure. Wherefore,
beware, O Ilderim! for know that, were there not a twinkle in
the star of thy nativity which promises for thee something that
is good and gracious in Heaven's good time, we two had not parted
till I had torn asunder the throat which so lately trilled forth
blasphemies."

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