Not long after this there arrived in the city a hideous man who to Vathek’s view displayed slippers which enabled the feet to walk, knives that cut without a motion of the hand, and sabres which dealt the blow at the person they were wished to strike, the whole enriched with gems that were hitherto unknown.  The sabres, whose blades emitted a dazzling radiance, fixed more than all the caliph’s attention, who promised himself to decipher at his leisure the uncouth characters engraven on their sides.  Without, therefore, demanding their price, he ordered all the coined gold to be brought from his treasury, and commanded the merchant to take what he pleased.  The stranger complied with modesty and silence; but, having maintained an obstinate silence on all the points on which the caliph questioned him, he was committed to prison, from which he was found the next day to have vanished, leaving his keepers dead.

Vathek was at first enraged, but having been comforted by his mother, the Princess Carathis, who was a Greek and an adept in all the sciences and systems of her country, he issued, at her suggestion, a proclamation promising the liberality for which he was renowned to whoever should decipher the characters on the sabres, and eventually had the gratification of meeting with an old man, who read them as follows:  “We were made where everything good is made; we are the least of the wonders of a place where all is wonderful, and deserving the sight of the first potentate on earth.”  Unfortunately, however, when the old man was ordered the next morning to re-read the inscription, he was then found to interpret it as denouncing:  “Woe to the rash mortal who seeks to know that of which he should remain ignorant.”  “And woe to thee!” cried the caliph, in a burst of indignation, and telling him to take his reward and begone.

II.—­The Caliph’s Strange Adventures

It was not long before Vathek discovered abundant reason for regretting his precipitation.  He plainly perceived that the characters on the sabres changed every day; and the anxiety caused by his failure to decipher them, or to read anything from the stars, brought on a fever, which deprived him of his appetite, and tormented him with an absolutely insatiable thirst.  From this distress he was at length delivered by a meeting with the stranger, who cured him by giving him to drink of a phial of red and yellow mixture.  But when this insolent person, at a banquet given in his honour, burst into shouts of laughter on being asked to declare of what drugs the salutary liquor had been compounded, and from what place the sabres had come, Vathek kicked him from the steps, and, repeating the blow, persisted with such assiduity as incited all present to follow his example.  The stranger collected into a ball, rolled out of the palace, followed by Vathek, the court, and the whole city, and, after passing through all the public places, rolled onwards to the Plain of Catoul, traversed the valley at the foot of the mountain of the Four Fountains, and bounded into the chasm formed there by the continual fall of the waters.