The Story Of The Saracens From The Earliest Times To The Fall Of Bagdad

Book Summary

The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE STORY OF THE SARACENS. HOW THE STORY BEGINS. EAST of the Red Sea, and just south of Palestine, there lies a strange land, belonging, we sometimes think, neither to Europe, nor to Asia, nor to Africa. Its rocky borders are washed by water on three sides, while on the fourth there lies a sandy desert of such little importance that men hardly care to own'it, and no boundary line is drawn to show where one nation's possessions end and the territory of the next neighbor begins. Sandy and rocky, almost without rivers or lakes, except in favored regions, with a great part entirely unknown, save, perhaps, to a few lonely wanderers or enthusiastic travellers, who have ventured to explore its barren wastes, this land was, at the time of which we write, strange to all the world. Roman and Macedonian, Jew and Gentile, had wandered around it; but no nation cared to inquire what secrets lay hidden in its broad and treacherous deserts. The haughty inhabitants looked back through many generations and assured each otherthat they were the ancient ones,-that they had Adam and Noah and Abraham and Ishmael for their fathers, and they cared as little for the rest of the world as the rest of the world cared for them. For how many generations these peculiar sons of the sands had lived in their primitive simplicity; for how many centuries they had fought the terrible simoons, and had carried their small merchandise over the deserts in a venerable commerce ; for what length of time they had dwelt in tents, feeding their dusky children with the dates and tamarinds that clustered on the branches which shaded them from the tropical sun, we cannot tell. They had no books, and their traditions were so evidently framed to bolster up a national pride that we cannot depend upon them as truth. At...

Book Details