Persian, you say, written in English characters? Yes, and it was
precisely this fact that made its meaning one of what the baronet
childishly calls "the lost secrets of the world": for every successive
inquirer, believing it part of an English phrase, was thus hopelessly
led astray in his investigation. "Has" is, in fact, part of the word
"Hasn-us-Sabah," and the mere circumstance that some of it has been
obliterated, while the figure of the mystic animal remains intact,
shows that it was executed by one of a nation less skilled in the art
of graving in precious stones than the Persians,--by a rude, mediaeval
Englishman, in short,--the modern revival of the art owing its origin,
of course, to the Medici of a later age. And of this Englishman--who
either graved the stone himself, or got some one else to do it for
him--do we know nothing? We know, at least, that he was certainly a
fighter, probably a Norman baron, that on his arm he bore the cross of
red, that he trod the sacred soil of Palestine. Perhaps, to prove this,
I need hardly remind you who Hasn-us-Sabah was. It is enough if I say
that he was greatly mixed up in the affairs of the Crusaders, lending
his irresistible arms now to this side, now to that. He was the chief
of the heterodox Mohammedan sect of the Assassins (this word, I
believe, is actually derived from his name); imagined himself to be an
incarnation of the Deity, and from his inaccessible rock-fortress of
Alamut in the Elburz exercised a sinister influence on the intricate
politics of the day. The Red Cross Knights called him Shaikh-ul-Jabal
--the Old Man of the Mountains, that very nickname connecting
him infallibly with the Ul-Jabal of our own times. Now three
well-known facts occur to me in connection with this stone of the House
of Saul: the first, that Saladin met in battle, and defeated, _and
plundered_, in a certain place, on a certain day, this Hasn-us-Sabah,
or one of his successors bearing the same name; the second, that about
this time there was a cordial _rapprochement_ between Saladin and