This is the graphic opening of “The Talisman.” The steel clad pilgrim was entering upon that great plain, once watered even as the Garden of the Lord, now an arid and sterile wilderness, sloping away to the Dead Sea, which hides beneath its sluggish waves the once proud cities of Sodom and Gomorrah;—a dark mass of water “Which holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and sends no tribute to the ocean.” It was a scene of desolation still testifying to the just wrath of the Almighty. As in the days of Moses, “The whole land was brimstone and salt; it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth thereon.” The first sentence of the chapter revealed the descriptive and artistic power of the novelist, for the desolation is made more desolate by the introduction of the solitary horseman, journeying slowly through the flitting sand, under the noontide splendor of the eastern sun. Almost a century has passed since the triumph of the first crusade. The Latin Kingdom, founded by its leaders, had lasted only eighty-eight years. Jerusalem is again in the hands of the Saracens. The crescent gleams on the Mosque of St. Omar. The cross has been torn from her temples, her shrines profaned, and the worshipers of the Holy Sepulcher murdered or exiled. The second crusade had been a failure, and its history a series of disasters. Thousands perished in the long march across Asia Minor. Those who reached Palestine undertook the siege of Damascus, but the attempt was disastrous. In 1187 a powerful leader of the East appeared in the high-souled and chivalrous Saladin. By wise counsel he united the factions of the Mohammedans, which had been at variance for two hundred years; and on the arrival of the third crusade, with which event we are now dealing, he was enabled to present a solid front of warriors “like unto the sand of the desert in multitude.” The land, where “peace and good will to men” had been proclaimed by the voices of angels, and emphasized by the blessed words of the Son of God, was again converted into a vast tournament field for the armies of Europe and Asia: aye more, even in the mountain passes that guard the Holy City, the mission of the crusaders was sacrificed to petty insults and rivalries. Richard the Lion-hearted and King Philip of France were repeating the old story of Achilles and Agamemnon. The military orders of the Knights of the Temple and the Knights of St. John, which had grown up in Jerusalem, founded as fraternities devoted to works of mercy in behalf of poor pilgrims, had become powerful rivals of each other and the clergy, and by intrigue and dissension purposely fomented the discord. According to the historian Michaud, “On the one side were the French, the German, the Templars and the Genoese; on the other the English, the Pisans, and the Knights of St. John.”