long war between his intellect which is mighty
and his spirit which is feeble. The intellect,
armed and winged by the passions, has
besieged and oppressed the soul; but the soul
has never ceased to repine and to repent. And
at moments it has gained its inherent ascendancy,
persuaded revenge to drop the prey it had seized,
turned the mind astray from hatred and wrath
into unwonted paths of charity and love. In the
long desert of guilt, there have been green spots
and fountains of good. The fiends have occupied
the intellect which invoked them, but they
have never yet thoroughly mastered the soul
which their presence appals. In the struggle that
now passes within that breast, amidst the flickers
of waning mortality, only Allah, whose eye never
slumbers, can aid."

Haroun then continued, in words yet more
strange and yet more deeply graved in my
memory:

"There have been men (thou mayst have
known such), who, after an illness in which life
itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a
sleep, with characters wholly changed. Before,
perhaps gentle and good and truthful, they now
become bitter, malignant, and false. To the
persons and the things they had before loved, they
evince repugnance and loathing. Sometimes this
change is so marked and irrational, that their
kindred ascribe it to madness. Not the madness
which affects them in the ordinary business of life,
but that which turns into harshness and discord
the moral harmony that results from natures
whole and complete. But there are dervishes who
hold that in that illness, which had for its time the
likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away,
and an evil genius has fixed itself into the body
and the brain, thus left void of their former tenant,
and animates them in the unaccountable change
from the past to the present existence. Such
mysteries have formed no part of my study, and I
tell you the conjecture received in the East without
hazarding a comment whether of incredulity or
belief. But if, in this war between the mind which
the fiends have seized and the soul which
implores refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon
traveller now covets life lengthened on earth for
the enjoyments it had perverted its faculties to
seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagerly that
it would shrink from no crime, and revolt from
no fiend, that could promise the gift—the soul
shudderingly implores to be saved from new
guilt, and would rather abide by the judgment of
Allah on the sifcs that have darkened it, than
pass for ever irredeemably away to the demons: if
this be so, what if the soul's petition be heard—
what if it rise from the ruins around it—what if
the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks to
rebuild them? There, if demons might enter,
that which they sought as their prize has escaped
them; that which they find would mock them by
its own incompleteness even in evil. In vain
might animal life the most perfect be given to the
machine of the flesh; in vain might the mind,
freed from the check of the soul, be left to roam
at will through a brain stored with memories of
knowledge and skilled in the command of its
faculties; in vain, in addition to all that body and
brain bestow on the normal condition of man,
might unhallowed reminiscences gather all the
arts and the charms of the sorcery by which the
fiends tempted the soul, before it fled, through
the passions of flesh and the cravings of mind:
the Thing, thus devoid of a soul, would be an
instrument of evil, doubtless; but an
instrument that of itself could not design, invent,
and complete. The demons themselves could
have no permanent hold on the perishable
materials. They might enter it for some gloomy
end which Allah permits in his inscrutable
wisdom; but they could leave it no trace when
they pass from it, because there is no conscience
where soul is wanting. The human animal without
soul, but otherwise made felicitously
perfect in its mere vital organisation, might ravage
and destroy, as the tiger and the serpent may
destroy and ravage, and, the moment after, would
sport in the sunlight harmless and rejoicing,
because, like the serpent and the tiger, it is
incapable of remorse."

"Why startle my wonder," said Derval, "with
so fantastic an image?"

"Because, possibly, the image may come into
palpable form! I know, while I speak to thee,
that this miserable man is calling to his aid the
evil sorcery over which he boasts his control.
To gain the end he desires, he must pass through
a crime. Sorcery whispers to him how to pass
through it, secure from the detection of man.
The soul resists, but, in resisting, is weak against
the tyranny of the mind to which it has
submitted so long. Question me no more. But if
I vanish from thine eyes, if thou hear that the
death which, to my sorrow and in my foolishness
I have failed to recognise as the merciful
minister of Heaven, has removed me at last from
the earth, believe that the Pale Visitant was
welcome, and that I humbly accept as a blessed
release the lot of our common humanity."

Sir Philip went to Damascus. There, he found
the pestilence raging—there, he devoted himself
to the cure of the afflicted; in no single instance,
so, at least, he declared, did the antidotes stored
in the casket fail in their effect. The pestilence
had passed; his medicaments were exhausted;
when the news reached him that Haroun was no
more. The Sage had been found, one morning,
lifeless in his solitary home, and, according to
popular rumour, marks on his throat betrayed the
murderous hand of the strangler. Simultaneously,
Louis Grayle had disappeared from the
city, and was supposed to have shared the fate of
Haroun, and been secretly buried by the assassins
who had deprived him of life. Sir Philip hastened
to Aleppo. There, he ascertained that on the
night in which Haroun died, Grayle did not
disappear alone; with him, were also missing two of
his numerous suite; the one, an Arab woman,
named Ayesha, who had for some years been
his constant companions, his pupil and associate