As a child, his home had been in Granada. He had seen his father
butchered by the late king, Muley Abul Hassan, without other crime than
his reputed riches; and his body literally cut open, to search for the
jewels it was supposed he had swallowed. He saw, and, boy as he was he
vowed revenge. A distant kinsman bore the orphan to lands more secure
from persecution; and the art with which the Jews concealed their wealth,
scattering it over various cities, had secured to Almamen the treasures
the tyrant of Granada had failed to grasp.

He had visited the greater part of the world then known; and resided for
many years at the court of the sultan of that hoary Egypt, which still
retained its fame for abstruse science and magic lore. He had not in
vain applied himself to such tempting and wild researches; and had
acquired many of those secrets now perhaps lost for ever to the world.
We do not mean to intimate that he attained to what legend and
superstition impose upon our faith as the art of sorcery. He could
neither command the elements nor pierce the veil of the future-scatter
armies with a word, nor pass from spot to spot by the utterance of a
charmed formula. But men who, for ages, had passed their lives in
attempting all the effects that can astonish and awe the vulgar, could
not but learn some secrets which all the more sober wisdom of modern
times would search ineffectually to solve or to revive. And many of such
arts, acquired mechanically (their invention often the work of a chemical
accident), those who attained to them could not always explain, not
account for the phenomena they created, so that the mightiness of their
own deceptions deceived themselves; and they often believed they were the
masters of the Nature to which they were, in reality, but erratic and
wild disciples. Of such was the student in that grim cavern. He was, in
some measure, the dupe, partly of his own bewildered wisdom, partly of