Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know
that of which he should remain ignorant." "And woe to thee!" cried the
caliph, in a burst of indignation, and telling him to take his reward
and begone.

_II.--The Caliph's Strange Adventures_

It was not long before Vathek discovered abundant reason for regretting
his precipitation. He plainly perceived that the characters on the
sabres changed every day; and the anxiety caused by his failure to
decipher them, or to read anything from the stars, brought on a fever,
which deprived him of his appetite, and tormented him with an absolutely
insatiable thirst. From this distress he was at length delivered by a
meeting with the stranger, who cured him by giving him to drink of a
phial of red and yellow mixture. But when this insolent person, at a
banquet given in his honour, burst into shouts of laughter on being
asked to declare of what drugs the salutary liquor had been compounded,
and from what place the sabres had come, Vathek kicked him from the
steps, and, repeating the blow, persisted with such assiduity as incited
all present to follow his example. The stranger collected into a ball,
rolled out of the palace, followed by Vathek, the court, and the whole
city, and, after passing through all the public places, rolled onwards
to the Plain of Catoul, traversed the valley at the foot of the mountain
of the Four Fountains, and bounded into the chasm formed there by the
continual fall of the waters.

Vathek would have followed the perfidious giaour had not an invisible
agency arrested his progress and that of the multitude; and he was so
much struck by the whole circumstance that he ordered his tents to be
pitched on the very edge of the precipice. After keeping several vigils
there, he was accosted one night by the voice of the giaour, who amid
the darkness caused by a total eclipse of the moon and the stars,
offered to bring him to the palace of subterranean fire, where he should
behold the treasures which the stars had promised him, and the talismans
that control the world, if he would abjure Mohammed, adore the
terrestrial influences, and satiate the stranger's thirst with the blood
of fifty of the most beautiful Samarahite boys.

The unhappy caliph lavished his promises in the utmost profusion, and by
arranging for the celebration near the chasm of some juvenile sports,
which were not concluded till twilight, was able to make the direful
libation. As the boys came up one