The emergency admitted of no delay. So pressing indeed was it, that a national and universal emigration was seriously discussed. Any evil was deemed preferable to the persecutions and outrages of the Christian soldiery. Since his occupation of Toledo, the military operations of Alfonso had evinced a wider and more portentous activity. His resources had been materially augmented. His army was almost doubled by the foreign mercenaries and adventurers who flocked to his standard. His arrogance increased in a direct ratio to his territorial acquisitions. He assumed the title of emperor, which had no foundation but his own inordinate vanity. He adopted the grandiloquent appellation of Sovereign of the Men of Two Religions, a title whose absurdity was the more apparent inasmuch as his orthodoxy was seriously questioned and his intolerance of the dogmas of Mohammed notorious and proverbial. He at all times made no secret of his intention to place the Moorish provinces of the Peninsula under the Castilian sceptre as soon as his martial preparations had been completed. To understand the course of subsequent events, it is now necessary to turn to the continent of Africa, where an ominous political and religious revolution had obliterated the boundaries of great nations and changed the face and the conditions of society. In the Desert of Sahara, south of ancient Numidia, there existed from time immemorial a race of nomadic warriors who traced a doubtful genealogy to the inhabitants of Yemen, in Arabia. The western part of the Desert was inhabited by the Lamtounah, a division of this race, affiliated by ties of tribal connection and intimacy with the Sanhadjah, who, from the time of the conquest of Musa, had been prominent in the wars and seditions of Al-Maghreb and Spain. The Lamtounah, with their kindred, belonged to the Berber nation, and pursued the primitive avocations of a pastoral life. In addition to their flocks, they maintained large numbers of ostriches and camels, which constituted the bulk of their movable possessions. Their food was camel’s flesh and milk; the barren sands of the Desert afforded no encouragement to the operations of agriculture, and the tribes of the Sahara were wholly unacquainted with the culture and the enjoyment of the products of the soil. The seclusion of their country, rarely penetrated by traders, who could find among such an uncivilized people few objects of barter, kept them in ignorance of the most ordinary commodities of life; of its luxuries they had no conception; and when, at rare intervals, a loaf of bread came into their hands through the medium of some generous traveller, it was regarded as a great curiosity. These nomads differed both in mental and physical characteristics from their neighbors. They were more fierce, more haughty, more brave. Their religion was idolatrous, slightly veneered with a spurious and corrupt Islamism; for, although