D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 Avoid a New Inn. Arabs would have asked if this work was for the glory of Mahommed, and, if the answer were in the negative, would have burned the place; these Christians meant to conserve the building, but to store away their levies in it. But it was gone, past preying on, or praying for—we quote a clerk who was facetious, but whose merry mood did not long continue. Indeed, there came on, while the soldiers were searching the district, one of those north- west blows, which sailors afterward describe as a “fresh wind,” but which landsmen remember as the worst tem- pest of the age. Such make the Bay of Biscay no pre- tender to the title of “Cemetery of the Atlantic.” Such depth have the waves that one expects to see the lost Atlantis’ inhabitants looking up at poor drowned man, and such force have the breakers that the spray covers the land for half a mile inward. This particular nor’wester was accompanied, or rather stripped from time to time by gusts out of the north, probably all the way from the North Sea, which brought sleet to mingle with the rain. The knights, cap- tains, monks, soldiers, mariners and clerks suffered a night of anguish in the desolation, so that, in the dawn, sneezing, coughing, wet to the skin, their armor rusty and their swords congealed in the scabbard, they strag- gled back to the port, disconsolate as if they had passed the time in purgatory without the time being allowed off their score. Thereafter, Las Salinas was accursed like the Dead City of the Plains, where Lot’s wife, incrusted with salt, stands at the gates. The fishers and smugglers procured their salt else- where, being far-roving persons, and only a very few poor ‘long-shore roamers, with fishers who contented themselves with near-at-hand game, ventured to return to the deserted village. They scooped out burrows in the shifting sands between detached rocks, for their wives and children to thatch them with seaweed, while they sailed out where toll gatherers were scarce. It was, therefore, with surprise that a man, who must have expected to see this little Tyre in her majesty, reined in his horse after coming down upon the plain, once covered with snowy, ‘glistening salt pans. He CORNICE KOO KSa(eovnn)