Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 3.djvu/131

⁠The hour is past, the Giaour is gone;
And did he fly or fall alone?^{[lower-roman 1]}
Woe to that hour he came or went!
The curse for Hassan's sin was sent280
To turn a palace to a tomb;
He came, he went, like the Simoom,^{[decimal 1]}
That harbinger of Fate and gloom,
Beneath whose widely-wasting breath
The very cypress droops to death—
Dark tree, still sad when others' grief is fled,
The only constant mourner o'er the dead!

⁠The steed is vanished from the stall;
No serf is seen in Hassan's hall;
The lonely Spider's thin gray pall^{[lower-roman 2]}290
Waves slowly widening o'er the wall;

Variants

1. But neither fled nor fell alone.—[MS.]
2. There are two MS. versions of lines 290-298: (A) a rough copy, and (B) a fair copy—
   (A)⁠And wide the Spider's thin grey pall
   Is curtained on the splendid wall—
   
   

Notes

Alter also the lines

"'On him who loves or hates or fears
Such moment holds a thousand years,'


to
"'O'er him who loves or hates or fears
Such moment pours the grief of years.'"]


1. The blast of the desert, fatal to everything living, and often alluded to in Eastern poetry.
   ⁠[James Bruce, 1730-1794 (nicknamed "Abyssinian Bruce"), gives a remarkable description of the simoom: "I saw from the south-east a haze come, in colour like the purple part of the rainbow, but not so compressed or thick. It did not occupy twenty yards in breadth, and was about twelve feet high from the ground. It was a kind of blush upon the air, and it moved very rapidly. . . . We all lay flat on the ground . . . till it was blown over. The meteor, or purple haze, which I saw was, indeed, passed, but the light air which still blew was of a heat to threaten suffocation." He goes on to say that he did not recover the effect of the sandblast on his chest for nearly two years (Bruce's Life and Travels, ed. 1830, p. 470).—Note to Edition 1832.]