, covered the heads of the
Bedouins; a short white gown, also of home manufacture, and very rude,
with a belt of cords, completed, with slippers, their costume.

Each man bore a musket and a dagger.

It was Baroni who had made the arrangement with Sheikh Hassan. Baroni
had long known him as a brave and faithful Arab. In general, these
contracts with the Bedouins for convoy through the desert are made by
Franks through their respective consuls, but Tancred was not sorry to
be saved from the necessity of such an application, as it would have
excited the attention of Colonel Brace, who passed his life at the
British Consulate, and who probably would have thought it necessary to
put on the uniform of the Bellamont yeomanry cavalry, and have attended
the heir of Montacute to Mount Sinai. Tancred shuddered at the idea of
the presence of such a being at such a place, with his large ruddy face,
his swaggering, sweltering figure, his flourishing whiskers, and his fat
hands.

It was the fifth morn after the visit of Tancred to Bethany, of which
he had said nothing to Baroni, the only person at his command who could
afford or obtain any information as to the name and quality of her
with whom he had there so singularly become acquainted. He was far from
incurious on the subject; all that he had seen and all that he had heard
at Bethany greatly interested him. But the reserve which ever controlled
him, unless under the influence of great excitement, a reserve which was
the result of pride and not of caution, would probably have checked any
expression of his wishes on this head, even had he not been under the
influence of those feelings which now absorbed him. A human being,
animated by the hope, almost by the conviction, that a celestial
communication is impending over his destiny, moves in a supernal sphere,
which no earthly consideration can enter. The long musings of his voyage
had been succeeded on the part of Tancred, since his arrival in the
Holy Land, by one unbroken and impassioned reverie, heightened, not
disturbed, by frequent and solitary prayer, by habitual fasts, and by
those exciting conferences with Alonza Lara, in which he had struggled
to penetrate the great Asian mystery, reserved however, if indeed ever
expounded, for a longer initiation than had yet been proved by the son
of the English noble.

After a week of solitary preparation, during which he had interchanged
no word, and maintained an abstinence which m