The voices died away like the Muezzins', whose cry is the sweetest and most striking of all Eastern sounds. It trembles in long-rising and falling cadences from the balcony of the minaret, more humanly alluring than bells, and more respectful of the warm stillness of Syrian and Egyptian days. Heard in Jerusalem it has especial power. You sit upon your house-top reading the history whose profoundest significance is simple and natural in that inspiring clime; and as your eye wanders from the aerial dome of Omar, beautiful enough to have been a dome of Solomon's Temple, and over the olives of Gethsemane climbs the Mount of Olives--the balmy air is suddenly filled with a murmurous cry, like a cheek suddenly rose-suffused--a sound near, and far, and every where, but soft and vibrating, and alluring, until you would fain don turban, kaftan, and slippers, and kneeling in the shadow of a cypress on the sun-flooded marble court of Omar, would be the mediator of those faiths, nor feel yourself a recreant Christian. Once I heard the Muezzin cry from a little village on the edge of the desert, in the starlight before the dawn: it was only a wailing voice in the air. The spirits of the desert were addressed in their own language--or was it themselves lamenting, like water-spirits to the green boughs overhanging them, that they could never know the gladness of the green world, but were forever demons and denizens of the desert? But the tones trembled away, without echo or response, into the starry solitude. Al-lá-hu Ak-bar, Al-lá-hu Ak-bar! So with songs and pictures, with musings, and the dinner of a Mecca pilgrim, passed the first evening upon the Nile. A CHARACTER.