with the assurance that
Christians, as well as Moslemah, had private feelings of personal pique,
and national quarrels, which were not entirely reconcilable. But the
Saracens were a race, polished, perhaps, to the utmost extent which
their religion permitted, and particularly capable of entertaining high
ideas of courtesy and politeness; and such sentiments prevented his
taking any notice of the inconsistency of Sir Kenneth's feelings in the
opposite characters of a Scot and a Crusader.

Meanwhile, as they advanced, the scene began to change around them. They
were now turning to the eastward, and had reached the range of steep and
barren hills which binds in that quarter the naked plain, and varies the
surface of the country, without changing its sterile character. Sharp,
rocky eminences began to rise around them, and, in a short time, deep
declivities and ascents, both formidable in height and difficult from
the narrowness of the path, offered to the travellers obstacles of a
different kind from those with which they had recently contended.

Dark caverns and chasms amongst the rocks--those grottoes so often
alluded to in Scripture--yawned fearfully on either side as they
proceeded, and the Scottish knight was informed by the Emir that these
were often the refuge of beasts of prey, or of men still more ferocious,
who, driven to desperation by the constant war, and the oppression
exercised by the soldiery, as well of the Cross as of the Crescent, had
become robbers, and spared neither rank nor religion, neither sex nor
age, in their depredations.

The Scottish knight listened with indifference to the accounts of
ravages committed by wild beasts or wicked men, secure as he felt
himself in his own valour and personal strength; but he was struck
with mysterious dread when he recollected that he was now in the awful
wilderness of the forty days' fast, and the scene of the actual personal
temptation, wherewith the Evil Principle was permitted to assail the Son
of Man. He withdrew his attention gradually from the light and worldly
conversation of the infidel warrior beside him, and, however acceptable
his gay and gallant bravery would have rendered him as a companion
elsewhere, Sir Kenneth felt as if, in those wildernesses the waste and
dry places in which the foul spirits were wont to wander when expelled
the mortals whose forms they possessed, a bare-footed friar would have
been a better associate than the gay but unbeliev