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
unbelieving paynim.

These feelings embarrassed him the rather that the Saracen's
spirits appeared to rise with the journey, and because the