this fearful place, in the company of
one who avouched himself to belong to such a lineage. Naturally
insusceptible, however, of fear, he crossed himself, and stoutly
demanded of the Saracen an account of the pedigree which he had boasted.
The latter readily complied.

"Know, brave stranger," he said, "that when the cruel Zohauk, one of the
descendants of Giamschid, held the throne of Persia, he formed a league
with the Powers of Darkness, amidst the secret vaults of Istakhar,
vaults which the hands of the elementary spirits had hewn out of the
living rock long before Adam himself had an existence. Here he fed,
with daily oblations of human blood, two devouring serpents, which had
become, according to the poets, a part of himself, and to sustain whom
he levied a tax of daily human sacrifices, till the exhausted patience
of his subjects caused some to raise up the scimitar of resistance, like
the valiant Blacksmith and the victorious Feridoun, by whom the tyrant
was at length dethroned, and imprisoned for ever in the dismal caverns
of the mountain Damavend. But ere that deliverance had taken place, and
whilst the power of the bloodthirsty tyrant was at its height, the band
of ravening slaves whom he had sent forth to purvey victims for his
daily sacrifice brought to the vaults of the palace of Istakhar seven
sisters so beautiful that they seemed seven houris. These seven maidens
were the daughters of a sage, who had no treasures save those beauties
and his own wisdom. The last was not sufficient to foresee this
misfortune, the former seemed ineffectual to prevent it. The eldest
exceeded not her twentieth year, the youngest had scarce attained her
thirteenth; and so like were they to each other that they could not
have been distinguished but for the difference of height, in which they
gradually rose in easy gradation above each other, like the ascent which
leads to the gates of Paradise. So lovely were these seven sisters when
they stood in the darksome vault, disrobed of all clothing saving a
cymar of white silk, that their charms moved the hearts of those who
were not mortal. Thunder muttered, the earth shook, the wall of the
vault was rent, and at the chasm entered one dressed like a hunter, with
bow and shafts, and followed by six others, his brethren. They were tall
men, and, though dark, yet comely to behold; but their eyes had more the
glare of those of the dead than the light which lives under the eyelids
of the