have been green spots and fountains of good. The fiends have occupied the
intellect which invoked them, but they have never yet thoroughly mastered
the soul which their presence appalls. In the struggle that now passes
within that breast, amidst the flickers of waning mortality, only Allah,
whose eye never slumbers, can aid."

Haroun then continued, in words yet more strange and yet more
deeply graved in my memory,--

"There have been men (thou mayst have known such), who, after an illness
in which life itself seemed suspended, have arisen, as out of a sleep,
with characters wholly changed. Before, perhaps, gentle and good and
truthful, they now become bitter, malignant, and false. To the persons
and the things they had before loved, they evince repugnance and loathing.
Sometimes this change is so marked and irrational that their kindred
ascribe it to madness,--not the madness which affects them in the
ordinary business of life, but that which turns into harshness and
discord the moral harmony that results from natures whole and complete.
But there are dervishes who hold that in that illness, which had for its
time the likeness of death, the soul itself has passed away, and an evil
genius has fixed itself into the body and the brain, thus left void of
their former tenant, and animates them in the unaccountable change from
the past to the present existence. Such mysteries have formed no part of
my study, and I tell you the conjecture received in the East without
hazarding a comment whether of incredulity or belief. But if, in this war
between the mind which the fiends have seized, and the soul which implores
refuge of Allah; if, while the mind of yon traveller now covets life
lengthened on earth for the enjoyments it had perverted its faculties to
seek and to find in sin, and covets so eagerly that it would shrink from
no crime and revolt from no fiend that could promise the gift, the soul