of a caravan for Damascus.  The present party was obliged to travel almost wholly by night, running the gauntlet of a dozen Arab encampments, and was only allowed a day’s stay at Palmyra.  They were all disguised as Bedouins, and took nothing with them but the necessary provisions.  They made their appearance here last evening, in long, white abas, with the Bedouin keffie bound over their heads, their faces burnt, their eyes inflamed, and their frames feverish with seven days and nights of travel.  The shekh who conducted them was not an Aneyzeh, and would have lost his life had they fallen in with any of that tribe.

Chapter X.

The Visions of Hasheesh.

  “Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting,
  Possessed beyond the Muse’s painting.”

  Collins.

During my stay in Damascus, that insatiable curiosity which leads me to prefer the acquisition of all lawful knowledge through the channels of my own personal experience, rather than in less satisfactory and less laborious ways, induced me to make a trial of the celebrated Hasheesh—­that remarkable drug which supplies the luxurious Syrian with dreams more alluring and more gorgeous than the Chinese extracts from his darling opium pipe.  The use of Hasheesh—­which is a preparation of the dried leaves of the cannabis indica—­has been familiar to the East for many centuries.  During the Crusades, it was frequently used by the Saracen warriors to stimulate them to the work of slaughter, and from the Arabic term of “Hashasheen," or Eaters of Hasheesh, as applied to them, the word “assassin” has been naturally derived.  An infusion of the same plant gives to the drink called “bhang,” which is in common use throughout India and Malaysia, its peculiar properties.  Thus prepared, it is a more fierce and fatal stimulant than the paste of sugar and spices to which the Turk resorts, as the food of his voluptuous evening reveries.  While its immediate effects seem to be more potent than those of opium, its habitual use, though attended with ultimate and permanent injury to the system, rarely results in such utter wreck of mind and body as that to which the votaries of the latter drug inevitably condemn themselves.

A previous experience of the effects of hasheesh—­which I took once, and in a very mild form, while in Egypt—­was so peculiar in its character, that my curiosity, instead of being satisfied, only prompted me the more to throw myself, for once, wholly under its influence.  The sensations it then produced were those, physically, of exquisite lightness and airiness—­of a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous, in the most simple and familiar objects.  During the half hour in which it lasted, I was at no time so far under its control, that I could not, with the clearest perception, study the changes through which I passed.  I noted, with careful attention, the