only difficult part, the
conquest of India, which baffled Alexander, is all done!'

CHAPTER XXXIII.

_A Pilgrim to Mount Sinai_

IT WAS not so much a conviction as a suspicion that Tancred had conveyed
to the young Emir, when the pilgrim had confessed that the depressing
thought sometimes came over him, that he was deficient in that
qualification of race which was necessary for the high communion to
which he aspired. Four-and-twenty hours before he was not thus dejected.
Almost within sight of Sinai, he was still full of faith. But his
vexatious captivity, and the enfeebling consequences of this wound,
dulled his spirit. Alone, among strangers and foes, in pain and in
peril, and without that energy which finds excitement in difficulty,
and can mock at danger, which requires no counsellor but our own quick
brain, and no champion but our own right arm, the high spirit of Tancred
for the first time flagged. As the twilight descended over the rocky
city, its sculptured tombs and excavated temples, and its strewn remains
of palaces and theatres, his heart recurred with tenderness to the halls
and towers of Montacute and Bellamont, and the beautiful affections
beneath those stately roofs, that, urged on, as he had once thought,
by a divine influence, now, as he was half tempted to credit, by a
fantastic impulse, he had dared to desert. Brooding in dejection, his
eyes were suffused with tears.

It was one of those moments of amiable weakness which make us all akin,
when sublime ambition, the mystical predispositions of genius, the
solemn sense of duty, all the heaped-up lore of ages, and the dogmas of
a high philosophy alike desert us, or sink into nothingness. The voice
of his mother sounded in his ear, and he was haunted by his father's
anxious glance. Why was he there? Why was he, the child of a northern
isle, in the heart of the Stony Arabia, far from the scene of his birth
and of his duties? A disheartening, an awful question, which, if it
could not be satisfactorily answered by Tancred of Montacute, it seemed
to him that his future, wherever or however passed, must be one of
intolerable bale.

Was he, then, a stranger there? uncalled, unexpected, intrusive,
unwelcome? Was it a morbid curiosity, or the proverbial restlessness of
a satiated aristocrat, that had drawn him to these wilds? What wilds?
Had he no connection with them? Had he not from his infancy repeated, in
the congregation of his people, the