A beautiful
and sometimes flickering light played over the sacred groups and
figures, softening the ravages of time, and occasionally investing them
with, as it were, a celestial movement.
'The gods of the Greeks!' exclaimed Tancred.
'The gods of the Ansarey,' said the Queen; 'the gods of my fathers!'
'I am filled with a sweet amazement,' murmured Tancred. 'Life is
stranger than I deemed. My soul is, as it were, unsphered.'
'Yet you know them to be gods,' said the Queen; 'and the Emir of the
Lebanon does not know them to be gods?'
'I feel that they are such,' said Fakredeen.
'How is this, then?' said the Queen. 'How is it that you, the child of a
northern isle----'
'Should recognise the Olympian Jove,' said Tancred. 'It seems strange;
but from my earliest youth I learnt these things.'
'Ah, then,' murmured the Queen to herself, and with an expression of the
greatest satisfaction, 'Dar-kush was rightly informed; he is one of us.'
'I behold then, at last, the gods of the Ansarey,' said Fakredeen.
'All that remains of Antioch, noble Emir; of Anti-och the superb, with
its hundred towers, and its sacred groves and fanes of flashing beauty.'
'Unhappy Asia!' exclaimed the Emir; 'thou hast indeed fallen!'
'When all was over,' said the Queen; 'when the people refused to
sacrifice, and the gods, indignant, quitted earth, I hope not for ever,
the faithful few fled to these mountains with the sacred images, and we
have cherished them.
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