a large scar on the
left side of his face which seemed to have deprived him of an eye. He
wore a black turban and black flowing robes, and there was a large chain
round his waist which clanked as he moved. It occurred to me that he was
one of the santons or sacred madmen so common in the East, and I retired
as he approached towards me. He called out: "Fly not, stranger; fear me
not, I will not harm you. You shall hear my story, it may be useful to
you." He spoke in Arabic but in a peculiar dialect and to me new, yet I
understood every word. "You see before you," he said, "a man who was
educated a Christian, but who renounced the worship of the one supreme
God for the superstitions of the pagans. I became an apostate in the
reign of the Emperor Julian, and I was employed by that Sovereign to
superintend the re-erection of the temple of Jerusalem, by which it was
intended to belie the prophecies and give the deathblow to the holy
religion. History has informed you of the result: my assistants were
most of them destroyed in a tremendous storm, I was blasted by lightning
from heaven (he raised his withered hand to his face and eye), but
suffered to live and expiate my crime in the flesh. My life has been
spent in constant and severe penance, and in that suffering of the spirit
produced by guilt, and is to be continued as long as any part of the
temple of Jupiter, in which I renounced my faith, remains in this place.
I have lived through fifteen tedious centuries, but I trust in the
mercies of Omnipotence, and I hope my atonement is completed. I now
stand in the dust of the pagan temple. You have just thrown the last
fragment of it over the rock. My time is arrived, I come!" As he spake
the last words, he rushed towards the sea, threw himself from the rock
and disappeared. I heard no struggling, and saw nothing but a gleam of
light from the wave that closed above him. I was now roused by the cries
of my servant and of the janissary, who were shaking my arm, and who
informed me that my sleep was so sound that they were alarmed for me.
When I looked on the sea, there was the same light, and I seemed to see
the very spot in the wave where the old man had sunk. I was so struck by
the vision, that I asked if they had not seen something dash into the
wave, and if they had not heard somebody speaking to me as they arrived.
Of course their answers were negative. In passing through Jerusalem and
in coasting the Dead Se