At the first glance it seemed that, ranged on blocks of the surrounding mountains, were a variety of sculptured figures of costly materials and exquisite beauty; forms of heroic majesty and ideal grace; and, themselves serene and unimpassioned, filling the minds of the beholders with awe and veneration. It was not until his eye was accustomed to the atmosphere, and his mind had in some degree recovered from the first strange surprise, that Tancred gradually recognised the fair and famous images over which his youth had so long and so early pondered. Stole over his spirit the countenance august, with the flowing beard and the lordly locks, sublime on his ivory throne, in one hand the ready thunderbolt, in the other the cypress sceptre; at his feet the watchful eagle with expanded wings: stole over the spirit of the gazing pilgrim, each shape of that refined and elegant hierarchy made for the worship of clear skies and sunny lands; goddess and god, genius and nymph, and faun, all that the wit and heart of man can devise and create, to represent his genius and his passion, all that the myriad developments of a beautiful nature can require for their personification. 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.