lid, with whom the glory of the dynasty culminated. Abd el Melik was a man of more than ordinary military ability, as the extension of his kingdom and the subjection of his rivals amply prove; but he was also addicted to letters, and encouraged literary men, giving them extravagant presents from his royal fortune. During his reign the three great poets of the early kalifate, Aktal, Farazdak, and Jerir flourished, and they were overwhelmed with. honors and riches by the kalif. Aktal was the chief favorite and his good fortune proved too much for him; he dressed in superb garments of silk, ornamented his person with golden chains, and indulged in unbecoming familiarity with his patron.

WHEN Walid assumed the reins of government that had fallen from the hands of his father, he naturally sought to continue some of the lines of public policy that he knew had been successful. He was a man of luxurious habits and elegant tastes, as tastes went at that period; he delighted in piling up grand edifices, in adorning them with all the gorgeousness for which Oriental architecture is famed, and he evidently wished to leave monuments of this kind which should keep him forever in memory. In this he was successful. He erected a grand mosque. at Cairo on the site of one that then stood there, and adorned its pillars with gilded capitals; he beautified and enlarged the mosque at Jerusalem that his father had built, and encouraged pilgrimages in that direction; he sent architects from the capital to tear down and build up those structures at Mecca which the faithful so greatly venerated, and he scandalized the feelings of the men of the olden time by thus continuing the departure from the simplicity that they remembered from their youth. His efforts were not all made at a distance from home, for he dispossessed the Christians of Damas

cus of their ancient church of St. John the Baptist, on which Roman emperors had long lavished their gold, and in which they had accumulated many relics of martyrs and saints, and on its site he employed workmen by the thousand in erecting at mosque in which, by uniting the architecture of Greece and Persia, he laid the foundation of the Saracenic style, from which some of the graces and ornamentations of the Gothic were to be borrowed in another age.

While Walid was living in luxury at Damascus and gratifying his artistic tastes, his generals were fighting for his empire in Asia Minor, in Korassan, in Africa, and making his authority everywhere felt. They ravaged Cappadocia, Armenia, Pontus, and Galatia, and brought to Damascus the usual crowds of captives bearing rich spoils. They crossed the Oxus, drove before them the hordes of Turkestan, and captured the city of Bokhara; they went again to Samarkand and, after a siege, obliged it to pay a great tribute annually in gold and to contribute. three thousand human beings every year to the slavemarts of Damascus;* and they undermined the religion of the Magians; they overran Scinde, and penetrated in that direction as far as the great river of India (A.D. 708).

On the water, their fleets ravaged Sicily and Sardinia, sacking cities and carrying off booty, prisoners,

"There is no place in Central Asia which has so impressed the imagination of Europe as Samarkand," Schuyler's "Turkistan," vol. i., p. 236. In 1497 the city was described as one of the most delightful for situation in the habitable world, and being of "wonderful elegance,"

ENCLOSURE OF THE MOSQUE OF OMAR, AT JERUSALEM.

and many beautiful maidens for the slave-market and the imperial harem. Everywhere the dread of the Saracens was becoming a new terror, for these were the times when international law was unknown and rulers did not expect to govern except by irresponsible despotism. So extensive was the sway of the kalif, indeed, that there seemed to be little left for his arms to conquer. They found their limit at the Pillars of Hercules.

We have seen a general rushing into the waves of the Atlantic, and complaining, like a lesser Alexander, that he had no world to conquer; now another Saracen, pursuing his career of conquest to the same limit, finds a means of carrying his standard farther. Success is not always good fortune in the struggle of life, and in earlier ages, when law was weaker and rulers arbitrary, a general was never sure of winning lasting favor by advancing the projects of his king.

At the beginning of his kalifate, Walid had sent one Musa into Africa to reconquer and quiet that revolutionary land. This general advanced to the spot where the continents of Africa and Europe approach within fifteen miles of one another, and at the town of Ceuta, situated on a rocky promontory facing the great rock of Gibraltar, met his first. effectual repulse. It proved but the forerunner of victory and conquest more notable than any he had before accomplished. Through the Pillars of Hercules he was destined to carry Moslem supremacy into a continent on which it had before been all but unknown.