Practically considered, his journey was tedious and for the most part dull and uninteresting. In these Satan-like days of "going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it" travelling has lost much of its old romantic charm, . . the idea of traversing long distances no more fills the expectant adventurer with a pleasurable sense of uncertainty and mystery--he knows exactly what to anticipate.. it is all laid out for him plainly on the level lines of the commonplace, and nothing is left to his imagination.
The Continent of Europe has been ransacked from end to end by tourists who have turned it into a sort of exhausted pleasure-garden, whereof the various entertainments are too familiarly known to arouse any fresh curiosity,--the East is nearly in the same condition,--hordes of British and American sight-seers scamper over the empire-strewn soil of Persia and Syria with the unconcerned indifference of beings to whom not only a portion of the world's territory, but the whole world itself, belongs,--and soon there will not be an inch of ground left on the narrow extent of our poor planet that has not been trodden by the hasty, scrambling, irreverent footsteps of some one or other of the ever-prolific, all-spreading English-speaking race.
On his way Alwyn met many of his countrymen,--travellers who, like himself, had visited the Caucasus and Armenia and were now en route, some for Damascus, some for Jerusalem and the Holy Land-- others again for Cairo and Alexandria, to depart from thence homeward by the usual Mediterranean line, . . but among these birds- of-passage acquaintance he chanced upon none who were going to the Ruins of Babylon. He was glad of this--for the peculiar nature of his enterprise rendered a companion altogether undesirable,--and though on one occasion he encountered a gentleman-novelist with a note-book, who was exceedingly anxious to fraternize with him and discover whither he vas bound, he succeeded in shaking off this would-be incubus at Mosul, by taking him to a wonderful old library in that city where there were a number of French translations of Turkish and Syriac romances.
Here the gentleman- novelist straightway ascended to the seventh heaven of plagiarism, and began to copy energetically whole scenes and descriptive passages from dead-and-gone authors, unknown to English critics, for the purpose of inserting them hereafter into his own "original" work of fiction--and in this congenial occupation he forgot all about the "dark handsome man, with the wide brows of a Marc Antony and the lips of a Catullus," as he had already described Alwyn in the note-book before-mentioned. While in Mosul, Alwyn himself picked up a curiosity in the way of literature,--a small quaint volume entitled "The Final Philosophy Of Algazzali The Arabian." It was printed in two languages--the original Arabic on one page, and, facing it, the translation in very old French. The author, born A.D. 1058, described himself as "a poor student striving to discern the truth of things"--and his work was a serious, incisive, patiently exhaustive inquiry into the workings of nature, the capabilities of human intelligence, and the deceptive results of human reason. Reading it, Alwyn was astonished to find that nearly all the ethical propositions offered for the world's consideration to-day by the most learned and cultured minds, had been already advanced and thoroughly discussed by this same Algazzali.