The violent emotion of Sebastian interrupted him: pale, trembling, oppressed with sudden hope almost to agony, the King vehemently seized one of Abensallah’s hands in both his, while his eyes only articulated the name of Aziek: the dervise hastily replied to them. “She lives, my son--she sends me to thee.” At these life-giving words, Sebastian’s transported countenance might be said to emit visible rays; he dropt the hand of Abensallah abruptly, and raising his own to heaven, uttered with his heart the acknowledgment his lips could not pronounce. When this rapturous disorder of the senses would allow him power, he exclaimed, “She lives--you say she lives, Abensallah!--how saved?--where sheltered?--This bird, soft and tender like herself, (ah, fit emblem of Kara Aziek) why is it sent?--assure me that she lives--you would not deceive me.” The impetuous agitation of youth was here gracefully contrasted by the majestic calmness of age: Abensallah listened with mildness to these broken and fluctuating sentences, then exhorting him to be composed, began to detail the circumstances of Kara Aziek’s escape. At the dreadful moment in which she was swept away from the arms of Sebastian, Providence ordained that a large wicker basket should be swept off also; by an instinctive action she snatched at it for support, and borne up by its elasticity, continued floating forward. The tide was flowing in, so that every surge impelled the basket, and its precious freight, nearer shore: one wave stronger than another, lifted them to a prodigious height, and then precipitated them upon the land; Aziek had just life enough left to feel the possibility of preserving life, and the fond idea that perhaps Sebastian was with her, gave her strength to move among the ledges of the rock on which she was cast, and to secure herself in a chasm: there she sunk down wholly exhausted, no longer sensible of danger, though the foaming billows alternately lashed and receded from the projection which sheltered her. The same morning air that had revived her distant lover, brought her back to a sense of existence; but she was incapable of motion, and remained two whole days undiscovered by any one, even while she heard people on the shore below, whom her feeble voice could not reach. She called on Sebastian, but her doleful accents alone returned on the echo. Some sea-fowl’s eggs deposited in the cleft that hid her, sufficed to keep nature from perishing; but grief, and the wounds her tender body had received while beaten against the rocks, had nearly terminated her short life, when a Moorish child clambering up in search of birds’ nests, descried her, and ran off to tell his parents. As her complexion, dress, and language, assured them she was a native of Barbary, these people carried her to their fishing-boat with great care; she fainted ere they reached it, reviving at last only to a state more like death than life.