The
fiends have occupied the intellect which invoked them, but they have
never yet thoroughly mastered the soul which their presence appalls. In
the struggle that now passes within that breast, amidst the flickers of
waning mortality, only Allah, whose eye never slumbers, can aid."

Haroun then continued, in words yet more strange and yet more deeply
graved in my memory,--

"There have been men (thou mayst have known such), who, after an illness
in which life itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a sleep,
with characters wholly changed. Before, perhaps, gentle and good and
truthful, they now become bitter, malignant, and false. To the persons
and the things they had before loved, they evince repugnance and
loathing. Sometimes this change is so marked and irrational that their
kindred ascribe it to madness,--not the madness which affects them in
the ordinary business of life, but that which turns into harshness and
discord the moral harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness, which had for its
time the likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away, and an evil
genius has fixed itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of
their former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable change from
the past to the present existence. Such mysteries have formed no part
of my study, and I tell you the conjecture received in the East without
hazarding a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if, in this
war between the mind which the fiends have seized, and the soul which
implores refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon traveller now
covets life lengthened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted
its faculties to seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagerly that it
would shrink from no crime and revolt from no fiend that could promise
the gift, the soul shudderingly implores to be saved from new guilt,
and would rather abide by the judgment of Allah on the sins that have
darkened it than pass forever irredeemably away to the demons,--if this
be so, what if the soul's petition be heard; what if it rise from the
ruins around it; what if the ruins be left to the witchcraft that seeks
to rebuild them? There, if demons might enter, that which they sought
as their prize has escaped them; that which they find would mock them by
its own incompleteness even in evil. In vain might animal life the most
perfect be given to the machine of t