The shadows of evening were now deepening, the gloom of the rocks as he passed along; though the sun had been long set, the air burnt like a furnace; the ground too was scorching; and the colour of the verdure being lost in the grey of twilight, contributed with this unrelenting heat, to give an air of savage sterility to the scene. Dried up by powerful suns, the mountain stream was known only by its stony channel; Sebastian hastily crossed it, and pushing through the matted boughs of the locust trees, a solitary bird shot from amongst them, and startled him with her piercing cry; long after she was flown, he stood listening to her fearful echo. What a spot for the last bed of a hero! yet Stukeley slept in it undisturbed! Never before, had death been so impressed on the senses of the young monarch. The desolation of the place, its now awful stillness, the deepening twilight, the devouring element by which he was surrounded, (for he knew not how to deem it air) and the strong contrast to them in his own animated hopes and busy thoughts, agitated him strangely; he stood as if transfixed, gazing on the mound of earth, without venturing to pollute what seemed to him so sacred, even by an embrace. He was roused from this trance by the sound of voices; one resembled that of the dervise, and it was calling on Alla for succour: regardless of personal risque (though unarmed,) Sebastian rushed into the valley, and soon reached the spot whence these cries proceeded; an aged Moor was struggling with a band of robbers; though not Abensallah, he could not refrain from bursting upon the plunderers, and attacking them with the limb of a tree, which, blown off by some storm, had lain luckily in his path. The blows of this unwieldy club, falling with inconceivable rapidity on every side, soon obliged the robbers to quit their prey, and turn on their new antagonist; they surrounded him, attacked him fiercely with their horrid knives, and one of them, succeeding in stabbing him behind, he dropped from loss of blood. Enraged at the escape of their first victim, (a rich merchant, who had been coming to ask the prayers of Abensallah,) the Alarbes, or mountain dwellers, as they are called, were on the point of wholly sacrificing the royal Portuguese to their vengeance, when a faint flash of lightning cast a gleam over his breast, and discovered through the folds of his coarse galebia, the costly setting of Donna Gonsalva’s picture; the head of the band immediately seized this precious prize, and soon lost in admiration of the diamonds all ideas of slaughter; he now ordered _the Christian dog_ (as he scornfully termed his captive,) to be lifted on a mule, directing one of the men to bandage his wound, and ride on the same beast.