of death, which, by thy counsel also, I urged him to use:  he received it with joy, and he is now doubtless numbered with the dead.’  ‘Hamet,’ said the Genius, ’is not dead; but from the fountain of virtue he drinks life and peace.  If what I shall propose, he refuses to perform, not all the powers of earth, and sea, and air, if they should combine, can give thee life:  but if he complies, the death, that is now suspended over thee, shall fall upon his head; and thy life shall be again delivered to the hand of time.’  ‘Make haste then,’ said Almoran, ‘and I will here wait the event.’  ‘The event,’ said the Genius, ’is not distant; and it is the last experiment which my power can make, either upon him or thee:  when the star of the night, that is now near the horizon, shall set, I will be with him.’

When Almoran was alone, he reflected, that every act of supernatural power which the Genius had enabled him to perform, had brought upon him some new calamity, though it always promised him some new advantage.  As he would not impute this disappointment to the purposes for which he employed the power that he had received, he indulged a suspicion, that it proceeded from the perfidy of the Being by whom it was bestowed; in his mind, therefore, he thus reasoned with himself:  ’The Genius, who has pretended to be the friend of Almoran, has been secretly in confederacy with Hamet:  why else do I yet sigh in vain for Almeida? and why else did not Hamet perish, when his life was in my power?  By his counsel, I persuaded Hamet to destroy himself; and, in the very act, I was betrayed to drink the potion, by which I shall be destroyed:  I have been led on, from misery to misery, by ineffectual expedients, and fallacious hopes.  In this crisis of my fate, I will not trust, with implicit confidence, in another:  I will be present at the interview of this powerful, but suspected Being, with Hamet; and who can tell, but that if I detect a fraud, I may be able to disappoint it:  however powerful, he is not omniscient; I may, therefore, be present, unknown and unsuspected even by him, in a form that I can chuse by a thought, to which he cannot be conscious.’

CHAP.  XIX.

In consequence of this resolution, Almoran, having commanded one of the soldiers of the guard that attended upon Hamet into an inner room of the palace, he ordered him to wait there till his return:  then making fast the door, he assumed his figure, and went immediately to the dungeon; where producing his signet, he said, he had received orders from the king to remain with the prisoner, till the watch expired.

As he entered without speaking, and without a light, Hamet continued stretched upon the ground, with his face towards the earth; and Almoran, having silently retired to a remote corner of the place, waited for the appearance of the Genius.