Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/69

Rh understood and appreciated. Unfortunately it is not in the programme.

But what is this which follows? Surely a contest still more familiar to him by report, at any rate, if not from actual experience, than any other. O Saladin! it is a tournament—a joust such as your spies may have brought you word of from the camp of the Crusaders before Acre and elsewhere in the lands overrun by their unbelieving hosts. A tournament, did I say? Nay, it is an "Ivanhoe Tournament," a passage of arms like that in which, though their names are recorded in no historic chronicle, knights as real as any you ever fought with took such gallant part. Hark! the note of the bugle! Will Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert come pricking forth into the lists with lance uplifted? Or will El Desdichado, the Disinherited Knight, appear amid a blare of trumpets at the far end of the barrack-square? No; there are other and more modern jousters. They are Sir Thomas de Blanchefarine and Sir Atkyn Le