Leila or, the Siege of Granada, Complete, Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton [best english novels for beginners TXT] 📗

drew before him some of the strange instruments we have described; and took from the recesses in the rock several scrolls. The old man lay at his feet, ready to obey his behests; but, to all appearance, rigid and motionless as the dead, whom his blanched hues and shrivelled form resembled. It was, indeed, as the picture of the enchanter at his work, and the corpse of some man of old, revived from the grave to minister to his spells, and execute his commands.

Enough in the preceding conversation has transpired to convince the reader, that the Hebrew, in whom he has already detected the Almamen of the Alhambra, was of no character common to his tribe. Of a lineage that shrouded itself in the darkness of his mysterious people, in their day of power, and possessed of immense wealth, which threw into poverty the resources of Gothic princes,—the youth of that remarkable man had been spent, not in traffic and merchandise but travel and study.

As a child, his home had been in Granada. He had seen his father butchered by the late king, Muley Abul Hassan, without other crime than his reputed riches; and his body literally cut open, to search for the jewels it was supposed he had swallowed. He saw, and, boy as he was he vowed revenge. A distant kinsman bore the orphan to lands more secure from persecution; and the art with which the Jews concealed their wealth, scattering it over various cities, had secured to Almamen the treasures the tyrant of Granada had failed to grasp.

He had visited the greater part of the world then known; and resided for many years at the court of the sultan of that hoary Egypt, which still retained its fame for abstruse science and magic lore. He had not in vain applied himself to such tempting and wild researches; and had acquired many of those secrets now perhaps lost for ever to the world. We do not mean to intimate that he attained to what legend and superstition impose upon our faith as the art of sorcery. He could neither command the elements nor pierce the veil of the future-scatter armies with a word, nor pass from spot to spot by the utterance of a charmed formula. But men who, for ages, had passed their lives in attempting all the effects that can astonish and awe the vulgar, could not but learn some secrets which all the more sober wisdom of modern times would search ineffectually to solve or to revive. And many of such arts, acquired mechanically (their invention often the work of a chemical accident), those who attained to them could not always explain, not account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness of their own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed they were the masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, but erratic and wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern. He was, in some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom, partly of the fervour of an imagination exceedingly high-wrought and enthusiastic. His own gorgeous vanity intoxicated him: and, if it be an historical truth that the kings of the ancient world, blinded by their own power, had moments in which they believed themselves more than men, it is not incredible that sages, elevated even above kings, should conceive a frenzy as weak, or, it may be, as sublime: and imagine that they did not claim in vain the awful dignity with which the faith of the multitude invested their faculties and gifts.

But, though the accident of birth, which excluded him from all field for energy and ambition, had thus directed the powerful mind of Almamen to contemplation and study, nature had never intended passions so fierce for the calm, though visionary, pursuits to which he was addicted. Amidst scrolls and seers, he had pined for action and glory; and, baffled in all wholesome egress, by the universal exclusion which, in every land, and from every faith, met the religion he belonged to, the faculties within him ran riot, producing gigantic but baseless schemes, which, as one after the other crumbled away, left behind feelings of dark misanthropy and intense revenge.

Perhaps, had his religion been prosperous and powerful, he might have been a sceptic; persecution and affliction made him a fanatic. Yet, true to that prominent characteristic of the old Hebrew race, which made them look to a Messiah only as a warrior and a prince, and which taught them to associate all their hopes and schemes with worldly victories and power, Almamen desired rather to advance, than to obey, his religion. He cared little for its precepts, he thought little of its doctrines; but, night and day, he revolved his schemes for its earthly restoration and triumph.

At that time, the Moors in Spain were far more deadly persecutors of the Jews than the Christians were. Amidst the Spanish cities on the coast, that merchant tribe had formed commercial connections with the Christians, sufficiently beneficial, both to individuals and to communities, to obtain for them, not only toleration, but something of personal friendship, wherever men bought and sold in the market-place. And the gloomy fanaticism which afterwards stained the fame of the great Ferdinand, and introduced the horrors of the Inquisition, had not yet made it self more than fitfully visible. But the Moors had treated this unhappy people with a wholesale and relentless barbarity. At Granada, under the reign of the fierce father of Boabdil,—“that king with the tiger heart,”—the Jews had been literally placed without the pale of humanity; and even under the mild and contemplative Boabdil himself, they had been plundered without mercy, and, if suspected of secreting their treasures, massacred without scruple; the wants of the state continued their unrelenting accusers,—their wealth, their inexpiable crime.

It was in the midst of these barbarities that Almamen, for the first time since the day when the death-shriek of his agonised father rang in his ears, suddenly returned to Granada. He saw the unmitigated miseries of his brethern, and he remembered and repeated his vow. His name changed, his kindred dead, none remembered, in the mature Almamen, the beardless child of Issachar, the Jew. He had long, indeed, deemed it advisable to disguise his faith; and was known, throughout the African kingdoms, but as the potent santon, or the wise magician.

This fame soon lifted him, in Granada, high in the councils of the court. Admitted to the intimacy of Muley Hassan, with Boabdil, and the queen mother, he had conspired against that monarch; and had lived, at least, to avenge his father upon the royal murderer. He was no less intimate with Boabdil; but steeled against fellowship or affection for all men out of the pale of his faith, he saw in the confidence of the king only the blindness of a victim.

Serpent as he was, he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraud he trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring upon his prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The curse of circumstance had humbled, but reconciled him to the dust. He had the crawl of the reptile,—he had, also, its poison and its fangs.