Tales of the Crusaders Author:Walter Scott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: from the trees, which partly hid its motions, and advanced towards the knight with a speed which soon showed a mounted horseman, whom his turhan, long spear, and... more » green caftan floating in the wind, on his nearer approach, showed to be a Saracen cavalier. " In the desert," saith an Eas tern proverb, " no man meets a friend." The crusader was totally indifferent whether the infidel, who now approached on his gallant barb, as if borne on the wings of an eagle, came as friend or foe—perhaps as a vowed champion of the Cross, he might rather have preferred the latter. He disengaged his lance from his saddle, seized it with the right hand, placed it in rest with its point half elevated, gathered up the reins in the left, waked his horse's mettle with the spur, and prepared to encounter the stranger with the calm self-confidence belonging to the victor in many contests. The Saracen came on at the speedy gallop of an Arab horseman managing his steed more by his limbs, and the inflection of his body, than by any use of the reins, which hung loose in his left hand ; so that he was enabled to wield the light round buckler of the skin of the rhinoceros, ornamented with silver loops, which he wore on his arm, swinging it as if he meant to oppose its slender circle to the formidable thrust of the western lance. His own long spear was not couched or levelled like that of his antagonist, but grasped by the middle with his right hand, and brandished at arm's length above his head. As the cavalier approached his enemy at full career, he seemed to expect that the Knight of the Leopard should put his horse to the gallop to encounter him. But the Christian knight, well acquainted with the customs of Eastern warriors, did not mean to exhaust his good horse by any unnecessary exertion ; and, on the con...« less