ltaneously Muza and
his Zegris made their fiery charge; and the Moorish infantry, excited by
the example of their leaders, followed with unslackened and dogged
zeal. The Christians gave way--they were beaten back: Ferdinand spurred
forward; and, ere either party were well aware of it, both kings met in
the same melee: all order and discipline, for the moment, lost, general
and monarch were, as common soldiers, fighting hand to hand. It was then
that Ferdinand, after bearing down before his lance Naim Reduon, second
only to Muza in the songs of Granada, beheld opposed to him a strange
form, that seemed to that royal Christian rather fiend than man: his
raven hair and beard, clotted with blood, hung like snakes about a
countenance whose features, naturally formed to give expression to the
darkest passions, were distorted with the madness of despairing rage.
Wounded in many places, the blood dabbled his mail; while, over
his head, he waved the banner wrought with mystic characters, which
Ferdinand had already been taught to believe the workmanship of demons.

"Now, perjured king of the Nazarenes!" shouted this formidable champion,
"we meet at last!--no longer host and guest, monarch and dervise, but
man to man! I am Almamen! Die!"

He spoke; and his sword descended so fiercely on that anointed head that
Ferdinand bent to his saddle-bow. But the king quickly recovered his
seat, and gallantly met the encounter; it was one that might have tasked
to the utmost the prowess of his bravest knight. Passions which, in
their number, their nature, and their excess, animated no other champion
on either side, gave to the arm of Almamen the Israelite a preternatural
strength; his blows fell like rain upon the harness of the king; and
the fiery eyes, the gleaming banner of the mysterious sorcerer, who
had eluded the tortures of his Inquisition,--who had walked unscathed
through the midst of his army,--whose single hand had consumed the
encampment of a host, filled the stout heart of a king with a belief
that he encountered no earthly foe. Fortunately, perhaps, for Ferdinand
and Spain, the contest did not last long. Twenty horsemen spurred into
the melee to the rescue of the plumed diadem: Tendilla arrived the
first; with a stroke of his two-handed sword, the white banner was cleft
from its staff, and fell to the earth. At that sight the Moors round
broke forth in a wild and despairing cry: that cry spread from rank to
rank, from horse t