Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/138

 have, in moments of confidence, candidly declared that we can go no farther. Here we must stop—all is problematical: therefore I have wished, however it may appear presumptuous, to go farther and remove some of these stumbling-blocks, not by erudition, but by trusting to some happy accident.

It is extraordinary that many of this nature have occurred to me during my residence in the East. First, many proofs of the fallacy of history; next, the denial of many curious facts, which are even scouted as gross superstitions, and are pretended to be doubted, because no one knows how to account for them, but which real knowledge can clearly substantiate. Then there is a gap in history which ought to be filled up with the reign of Malek Sayf (a second King Solomon), and his family, and after him with that of Hamzy, the sort of Messiah of the Druzes, who is expected to return in another form. I once saw a work, which clearly proved the Pyramids to be antediluvian, and that Japhet was aware the deluge was to be partial, as he placed that which was most valuable to him in another quarter of the world.

The Bedoween Arabs may be divided into two distinct classes, original Arabs, and the descendants of Ismael, whose daughter married the ninth descendant of the great Katàn, out of which germ sprang the famous tribe of the Koreish, subdivided into many