The Talisman. Вальтер Скотт

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СКАЧАТЬ environs of the castle of the demons. They were darker, taller, fiercer, and more resolute than any of the scattered inhabitants of the valleys of Kurdistan; and they took to themselves wives, and became fathers of the seven tribes of the Kurdmans, whose valour is known throughout the universe.”

      The Christian knight heard with wonder the wild tale, of which Kurdistan still possesses the traces, and, after a moment’s thought, replied, “Verily, Sir Knight, you have spoken well – your genealogy may be dreaded and hated, but it cannot be contemned. Neither do I any longer wonder at your obstinacy in a false faith, since, doubtless, it is part of the fiendish disposition which hath descended from your ancestors, those infernal huntsmen, as you have described them, to love falsehood rather than truth; and I no longer marvel that your spirits become high and exalted, and vent themselves in verse and in tunes, when you approach to the places encumbered by the haunting of evil spirits, which must excite in you that joyous feeling which others experience when approaching the land of their human ancestry.”

      “By my father’s beard, I think thou hast the right,” said the Saracen, rather amused than offended by the freedom with which the Christian had uttered his reflections; “for, though the Prophet (blessed be his name!) hath sown amongst us the seed of a better faith than our ancestors learned in the ghostly halls of Tugrut, yet we are not willing, like other Moslemah, to pass hasty doom on the lofty and powerful elementary spirits from whom we claim our origin. These Genii, according to our belief and hope, are not altogether reprobate, but are still in the way of probation, and may hereafter be punished or rewarded. Leave we this to the mollahs and the imauns. Enough that with us the reverence for these spirits is not altogether effaced by what we have learned from the Koran, and that many of us still sing, in memorial of our fathers’ more ancient faith, such verses as these.”

      So saying, he proceeded to chant verses, very ancient in the language and structure, which some have thought derive their source from the worshippers of Arimanes, the Evil Principle.

AHRIMAN

           Dark Ahriman, whom Irak still

           Holds origin of woe and ill!

           When, bending at thy shrine,

           We view the world with troubled eye,

           Where see we ‘neath the extended sky,

           An empire matching thine!

           If the Benigner Power can yield

           A fountain in the desert field,

           Where weary pilgrims drink;

           Thine are the waves that lash the rock,

           Thine the tornado’s deadly shock,

           Where countless navies sink!

           Or if he bid the soil dispense

           Balsams to cheer the sinking sense,

           How few can they deliver

           From lingering pains, or pang intense,

           Red Fever, spotted Pestilence,

           The arrows of thy quiver!

           Chief in Man’s bosom sits thy sway,

           And frequent, while in words we pray

           Before another throne,

           Whate’er of specious form be there,

           The secret meaning of the prayer

           Is, Ahriman, thine own.

           Say, hast thou feeling, sense, and form,

           Thunder thy voice, thy garments storm,

           As Eastern Magi say;

           With sentient soul of hate and wrath,

           And wings to sweep thy deadly path,

           And fangs to tear thy prey?

           Or art thou mix’d in Nature’s source,

           An ever-operating force,

           Converting good to ill;

           An evil principle innate,

           Contending with our better fate,

           And, oh!  victorious still?

           Howe’er it be, dispute is vain.

           On all without thou hold’st thy reign,

           Nor less on all within;

           Each mortal passion’s fierce career,

           Love, hate, ambition, joy, and fear,

           Thou goadest into sin.

           Whene’er a sunny gleam appears,

           To brighten up our vale of tears,

           Thou art not distant far;

           ‘Mid such brief solace of our lives,

           Thou whett’st our very banquet-knives

           To tools of death and war.

           Thus, from the moment of our birth,

           Long as we linger on the earth,

           Thou rulest the fate of men;

           Thine are the pangs of life’s last hour,

           And – who dare answer? – is thy power,

           Dark Spirit!  ended THEN?

      [The worthy and learned clergyman by whom this species of hymn has been translated desires, that, for fear of misconception, we should warn the reader to recollect that it is composed by a heathen, to whom the real causes of moral and physical evil are unknown, and who views their predominance in the system of the universe as all must view that appalling fact who have not the benefit of the Christian revelation. On our own part, we beg to add, that we understand the style of the translator is more paraphrastic than can be approved by those who are acquainted with the singularly curious original. The translator seems to have despaired of rendering into English verse the flights of Oriental poetry; and, possibly, like many learned and ingenious men, finding it impossible to discover the sense of the original, he may have tacitly substituted his own.]

      These verses may perhaps have been the not unnatural effusion of some half-enlightened philosopher, who, in the fabled deity, Arimanes, saw but the prevalence of moral and physical evil; but in the ears of Sir Kenneth of the Leopard they had a different effect, and, sung as they were by one who had just boasted himself a descendant of demons, sounded very like an address of worship to the arch-fiend himself. He weighed within himself whether, on hearing such blasphemy in the very desert where Satan had stood rebuked for demanding homage, taking an abrupt leave of the Saracen was sufficient to testify his abhorrence; or whether he was not rather constrained by his vow as a Crusader to defy the infidel to combat on the spot, and leave him food for the beasts of the wilderness, when his attention was suddenly caught by an unexpected apparition.

      The light was now verging low, yet served the knight still to discern that they two were no longer alone in the desert, but were closely watched by a figure of great height and very thin, which skipped over rocks and bushes with so much agility as, added to the wild and hirsute appearance of the individual, reminded him of the fauns and silvans, whose images he had seen in the ancient temples of Rome. As the single-hearted Scottishman had never for a moment doubted these gods of the ancient Gentiles to be actually devils, so he now hesitated not to believe that the blasphemous hymn of the Saracen had raised up an infernal spirit.

      “But СКАЧАТЬ