"'Thou too shalt die!' growled the old barbarian, discharging his pistol at poor little Zela, who fell dead without a groan, with the purple blood streaming from her white bosom, which I saw heave its last convulsive throb around the death-shot. The thick muslin turban of Mohammed saved him from one tremendous blow which I dealt at his scowling visage, but he sunk to the earth beneath the weight of the claymore.
"'Allah, il Allah! death to the soldiers of Isauri!'[*] yelled his infuriated followers, rushing madly on me, and in an instant I was vanquished: I received a terrible blow on the back of my head from the iron mace of a Mameluke. I remember no more than just seeing Cameron cut two down to the teeth, run a third through the brisket, leap the window, and escape.
[*] Jesus Christ.
"'Good by, Cameron; gallantly done!' cried I, as I sunk stunned and senseless by the lifeless corse of Zela.
"How long I lay insensible I know not; but when my faculties returned I found myself stretched upon the ground, which felt cold and damp, and in a place involved in the deepest and most impenetrable gloom. I found that the epaulets and lace had been torn from my coat, and an intense pain on the back of my head reminded me of the blow of the steel mace; and on raising my hand to the wound, I found my hair clotted and hardened with coagulated blood. Rats or some monstrous vermin running over me caused me to leap from the ground, and endeavour to discover where I was. This the darkness rendered impossible; but by the chill atmosphere of the place, the difficulty of respiration I experienced, and the hollow echoes of my feet, dying dismally away in distant cavities, I conjectured rightly that I was imprisoned in some subterranean vault. What the agony of my mind was when this idea became confirmed, you may better conceive than I describe. I recollected that the troops marched next day, and that unless Fassifern made some most strenuous attempt to discover and free me, I should be left at the mercy of the lawless Mohammed, either to be his perpetual captive in a dungeon, to be left to a slow lingering death by starvation, or a more expeditious one by some mode of torture, such as the most refined spirit of Eastern cruelty and barbarism could invent.
"In groping about, I soon came in contact with a stone wall, which I felt carefully all round, but no door or outlet could I discover. A succession of wooden boxes placed upright, sounding and hollow when I touched them, informed me at once of the truth,—that I was cast into one of those ancient catacombs which are so numerous under the city of Alexandria,—horrible caverns hollowed in the bowels of the earth, where the mummy-remains of the subjects of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and others, out-standing the course of more than twenty centuries, lay swathed in their bandages and embalming! The blood rushed back upon my trembling heart, and every hair on my aching head seemed to bristle upon my scalp, as I staggered dizzily against the mouldy wall, knocking down half-a-dozen mummy-coffers, which fell heavily and hollowly upon the pavement.
"You may imagine what were my feelings when I reviewed my situation. I, a superstitious Highland boy, that used to shake in my brogues, like a dog in a wet sack, if I passed the kirk-yard of Inverary after night-fall, and never went into the dark but with my eyes closed tight for fear of seeing something 'uncanny,' when I found myself in this gloomy repository of the dead I was so confounded and terrified, that it was long before I recovered my self-possession so far as to cast a firm glance of scrutiny around me, and endeavour to discover some means of escape. I perceived with joy a faint ray of daylight streaming through a small aperture, which appeared nearly twenty feet above me.
"'Dawn has broken!' I exclaimed in sudden anguish; 'the troops must have marched! Cameron cannot have escaped Mohammed, or, oh, my God! surely he would not, without making an effort to save me, abandon me to perish here!'
"'Perish here!' repeated half-a-dozen dreary echoes. I looked around me in consternation. The sounds almost seemed to proceed from the red blubber-like lips of the frightful faces which I now perceived carved and painted on the outside of the upright mummy-coffers. They were the figures of the dead, and tinted with those imperishable colours with which the ancient Egyptians decorated the exterior of their temples. The large round eyes of these appalling effigies seemed to be staring hard at me from every dark corner, winking, goggling, and rolling; while their very mouths, capacious and red, expanded into a broad grin, methought, at my misery. Against the black wall they were ranked at equal distances, but here and there were some which had fallen to pieces, and lay upon the earth, exposing the decayed and mouldered corse standing stark, gaunt, and erect, swathed tightly in its cerements. Others had fallen down, and lay prostrate among little urns, containing, I suppose, the embalmed remains of the sacred ibis, the monkey, or other animals revered by the ancient idolaters. Enormous bats were sailing about, black scorpions, and many a huge bloated reptile, of which I knew not even the name, appearing as if formed alone for such a place, crawled about the coffins, or fell now and then with a heavy squabby sound from the wet slimy wall on the moist and watery pavement.
"By the grey light, straggling through what seemed a joint in the key-stone of an arch above, I was enabled to note these things, and I did so with wary and fearful glances, while my heart swelled almost to breaking when I thought of my blighted hopes, and that home which was far awa—the green mountains of Mull and of Morven, and the deep salt lochs of Argyle; and, dearer than all, the well-known hearth where I had sat at the knee of my mother, and heard her rehearse those wild traditions of hill and valley, which endeared them more to me.