Zenobia; or, the Fall of Palmyra

by William Ware

It was a day the air of which was like the air of that furnace--burning--burning hot. Death was written upon the whole face of the visible earth. Where leaves had been, there were none now, or they crumbled into ashes as the hand touched them. The atmosphere, when moved by the wind, brought not, as it is used to do, a greater coolness, but a fiercer heat. It was full of flickering waves that danced up and down with a quivering motion, and dazzled and blinded the eye that looked upon them. And the sand was not like that which for the most part is met with on that desert stretching from the Mediterranean to Palmyra, and of which thou hast had some experience--heavy, and hard, and seamed with cracks--but fine, and light, and raised into clouds by every breath of wind, and driven into the skin like points of needles. When the wind, as frequently it did, blew with violence, we could only stop and bury our faces in our garments, our poor beasts crying out with pain. It was on such a day, having, because there was no place of rest, been obliged to endure all the noonday heat, that, when the sun was at the highest and we looked eagerly every way for even a dry and leafless bush that we might crouch down beneath its shade, we saw at a distance before us the tall trunk of a cedar, bleached to ivory, and twinkling like a pharos under the hot rays. We slowly approached it, Hadad, my Ethiopian, knowing it as one of the pillars of the desert.

'There it has stood and shone a thousand years,' said he; 'and but for such marks, who could cross these seas of sand, where your foot-mark is lost, as soon as made?' After a few moments' pause, he again exclaimed: 'And by the beard of holy Abraham! a living human being sits at the root--or else mayhap my eyes deceive me, and I see only the twisted roots of the tree.'

''T is too far for my eyes to discern aught but the blasted trunk. No living creature can dwell here. 'T is the region of death only.'

A blast of the desert struck us at the moment, and well nigh buried us in its rushing whirlwind of sand. We stood still, closed our eyes, and buried our faces in the folds of our garments.

'Horrible and out of nature!' I cried--'the sun blazing without a cloud as big as a locust to dim his ray, and yet these gusts, like the raging of a tempest. The winds surely rise. Providence be our guide out of this valley of fire and death!'

'There is no providence here,' said the slave, 'nor any where; else why these savage and dreary deserts, which must be crossed, and yet we die in doing it.'

'Hold thy peace, blasphemer!' I could not but rejoin, 'and take heed lest thy impious tongue draw down a whirlwind of God to the destruction of us both.'

'The curse of Arimanes'--began the irritated slave--when suddenly he paused, and cried out in another tone: 'Look! look! Isaac, and see now for thyself: I am no Jew, if there sit not a woman at the root of yonder tree,'

I looked, and now that we had drawn nearer, and the wind had subsided for an instant, I plainly beheld the form of a woman, bent over as if in the act of holding and defending an infant. I believed it a delusion of Satan.

'It is awful,' said I; 'but let us hasten; if it be a reality, our coming must be as the descent of angels.'