at liberty through the desert waste. Sometimes it was an ugly camel,
then it was a long-necked and disproportioned giraffe, and then again
a long-legged ostrich hastening away with its wings outspread. They
all appeared to scorn him, and he had already taken his resolve to
open his eyes no more, and to give himself up to his fate, without
allowing these horrible and strange creatures to disturb his mind in
the hour of death.

Presently it seemed to him as if he heard the hoofs and neighing of a
horse, and suddenly something halted close beside him, and he thought
he caught the sound of a man's voice. Half unwilling, he could not
resist raising himself wearily, and he saw before him a rider in an
Arab's dress mounted on a slender Arabian horse. Overcome with joy
at finding himself within reach of human help, he exclaimed,
"Welcome, oh, man, in this fearful solitude! If thou canst, succor
me, thy fellow-man, who must otherwise perish with thirst!" Then
remembering that the tones of his dear German mother tongue were not
intelligible in this joyless region, he repeated the same words in
the mixed dialect, generally called the Lingua Romana, universally
used by heathens, Mohammedans, and Christians in those parts of the
world where they have most intercourse with each other.

The Arab still remained silent, and looked as if scornfully laughing
at his strange discovery. At length he replied, in the same dialect,
"I was also in Barbarossa's fight; and if, Sir Knight, our overthrow
bitterly enraged me then, I find no small compensation for it in the
fact of seeing one of the conquerors lying so pitifully before me."
"Pitifully!" exclaimed Heimbert angrily, and his wounded sense of
honor giving him back for a moment all his strength, he seized his
sword and stood ready for an encounter. "Oho!" laughed the Arab,