When the journey across this dreadful waste is
completed, the trembling traveller arrives at the city of the Great
Khan.[1]
[Footnote 1: Leigh Hunt.]
In this rich chapter of horrors how finished an allegory for old John
Bunyan! With what religious unction he would have led his Christian
traveller from that unknown city on the edge of the sands, across the
Soul's Desert of Lop, with its
"Voices calling in the dead of night,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names,"
safe into the _City of the Great Khan!_
Leigh Hunt declares that he has read, in some other account, of a
dreadful, unendurable face that used to stare at people as they went
by.
The Barbaric has also its features of solemnity and grandeur, filling
the mind with exalted contemplations, and the imagination with
inspiring and ennobling apparitions. Surroundings that contribute a
quality of awfulness embrace in such scenes the soul of the traveller,
and hold him in their tremendous thrall. Mean or flippant ideas may not
enter here; but the man puts off the smaller part of him, as the
Asiatic puts off his sandals on entering the porches of his god.
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