112 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ENTERTAINING VARIETIES. 



THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON;* 



OR, 



TRAVELS AND ADVENTURES OF HAKIM BEN SHEYTAN. 



Translated by F. L. 0. 



CHAPTEE III. 



" Whose salam hails me? Hath my friend returned ? 

 It is his form, but not his cheerful voice." 



SO says the poet ; and thou, too, O father of my faith,f wilt find 

 me an altered man, if it be the will of Allah that we shall meet 

 again. Yet not the frost has chilled my heart ; not the harmattan- 

 wind has seared my brow : the gloom that clouds my soul is the gloom 

 of sorrow for the boundless misery of my fellow-creatures even of 

 my fellow-men. For the habitants of Monghistan are not brutes ; nor 

 are they apes, J gifted with human skill. No : they are men, degraded 

 by vice and monstrous superstitions, and as a human being I share in 

 their shame, and the weight of their woe oppresses my own heart. 

 May the angel of mercy be their helper ! 



Beth-Raka is not a large town, and I hoped to reach the opposite 

 hills by sunset ; but, before we had made our way to the end of the 

 first street, the smoke began to stifle our breath, and we concluded to 

 make a detour to the right and approach the furnace from the north 

 side of the town, where the ground was higher and the air less suffo- 

 cating. We entered a side-street, and would to Allah the smoke 

 had been dense enough to blind our eyes and save us the distress of 

 beholding such misery ! The street forms a hollow way through the 

 hills, and the rocks on both sides are full of caves, most of them 

 widened to a height of eight feet. In and around these caves we saw 

 a swarm of shapes as if the sleepers of a rock-tomb had issued from 

 their gloomy dens withered forms, bloated or swollen faces, and eyes 

 that were not fit to meet the light of day. We met a half -grown lad 

 with the face of an old man, and laborers that were too infirm to walk 

 erect, and as we proceeded I saw with horror that the condition of 

 these unfortunates was not the result of an exceptional malady, but of 



* Copyright by D. Appleton & Company, 1882. 



f Addressed to the Mollah of Tripoli. The pastor fides of an Arabian mosque styles 

 himself " Guardian of the Faith," and " Gate-keeper of the Peace-house " (Kada'l Beth- 

 Salam). 



% " All that day we met neither man nor beast nor ape," says Ibn Koteiba in his 

 chronicle of the Mauritanian campaign. Monkeys, in the opinion of the Arabs, are not 

 beasts, but Ayd-Kapi's a sort of half -men. 



