d the secret of the Ansarey."

Her maidens adorned her with a garland of roses, and put a garland on
the head of Tancred, and she led him through a portal of bronze, down an
underground passage, into an Ionic temple, filled with the white and
lovely forms of the gods of ancient Greece.

"Do you know this?" said the queen to Tancred, looking at a statue in
golden ivory, and then at the young Englishman, whose clear-cut features
and hyacinthine locks curiously resembled those of the carven image.

"It is Phoebus Apollo," said Tancred, and, moved by admiration at the
beauty of the figure, he murmured some lines of Homer.

"Ah, you know all!" cried the queen. "You know our secret language. Yes,
this is Phoebus Apollo. He used to stand in Antioch in the ancient days
before the Christians drove us into the mountains. And look," she said,
pointing to the statue beside Apollo, "here is the Syrian goddess before
whom the pilgrims of the world once knelt. She is named Astarte, and I
am called after her."

"Oh, angels watch over me!" said Tancred to himself as Queen Astarte
fixed her violet eyes upon him with a glance of love that could not be
mistaken, and led him back into the hall of audience.

There he saw Fakredeen bending over a maiden with a flower-like face,
and large, dark, lustrous eyes.

"She is my foster-sister, Eva," said Fakredeen. "The Ansareys captured
her on the plain of Aleppo."

Tancred had met Eva at the house of Besso in Jerusalem, but she did not
then exercise over him the strange charm which now drew him to her side.
It seemed to him that the beautiful Jewish girl had been sent to help
him in his struggle against the heathen spells of Astarte. As he was
meditating how he could rescue her, a messenger came in, and announced
that the pasha of Aleppo had invaded the mountains at the head of 5,000
troops.

"Ah!" cried Astarte. "Few of them will ever see Aleppo again. I have
25,000 men under arms, and you, my prince," she said, turning to
Tancred, "shall command them."

Tancred had learnt something of the arts of mountain warfare from Sheikh
Amalek. He allowed the Turkish troops to penetrate into the heart of the
wild hills, and then, as they were marching down a long defile, he
attacked them from the crests above, shooting them down like sheep and
burying them in avalanches of rolling rock. Instead of returning to the
fortress palace, he sent his men on ahead, and rode out alone into the
desert, and