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