Why was he there? Why was he, the child of a northern
isle, in the heart of the Stony Arabia, far from the scene of his birth
and of his duties? A disheartening, an awful question, which, if it
could not be satisfactorily answered by Tancred of Montacute, it seemed
to him that his future, wherever or however passed, must be one of
intolerable bale.
Was he, then, a stranger there? uncalled, unexpected, intrusive,
unwelcome? Was it a morbid curiosity, or the proverbial restlessness of
a satiated aristocrat, that had drawn him to these wilds? What wilds?
Had he no connection with them? Had he not from his infancy repeated, in
the congregation of his people, the laws which, from the awful summit of
these surrounding mountains, the Father of all had Himself delivered for
the government of mankind? These Arabian laws regulated his life.
And the wanderings of an Arabian tribe in this 'great and terrible
wilderness,' under the immediate direction of the Creator, sanctified by
His miracles, governed by His counsels, illumined by His presence, had
been the first and guiding history that had been entrusted to his young
intelligence, from which it had drawn its first pregnant examples
of human conduct and divine interposition, and formed its first dim
conceptions of the relations between man and God.
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