In lash for lash, and bound for bound:

The foam that streaks the courser's side

Seems gathered from the Ocean-tide:

Though weary waves are sunk to rest,

There's none within his rider's breast;

And though to-morrow's tempest lower,

'Tis calmer than thy heart, young Giaour!

Having peered into the idyllic picture of the Muslim holiday – the end of Ramazan – hung with armour and torn into pieces with his incurable inner pain he disappears:

The Crescent glimmers on the hill,

The Mosque's high lamps are quivering still

Though too remote for sound to wake

In echoes of the far tophaike,[68]

The flashes of each joyous peal

Are seen to prove the Moslem's zeal.

To-night, set Rhamazani's sun;

To-night, the Bairam feast's begun;

To-night--but who and what art thou

Of foreign garb and fearful brow?

And what are these to thine or thee,

That thou shouldst either pause or flee?

Anonymous narrator melancholically ascertains desolation that came to before noisy and lively house of the Hassan the Turk, who was killed by the hand of the Christian:

The curse for Hassan's sin was sent

To turn a palace to a tomb;

He came, he went, like the Simoom,

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!

A short, strange episode appears within sad lamentation – a rich Turk and his servants hire a boatman to bury an unknown “burden”. Hassan, having lost his much loved wife and not having enough strength to distract from this, lives only by the thirst of vengeance to his enemy – the Giaour. Once, having overcome a dangerous mountain pass with the сaravan, he confronted the ambush organized by rogues in the copse and recognized his enemy as their chief. They met in the mortal combat and the Giaour killed him, but the suffering soul of the latter and his grief over his lost love leave unquenched as well as his loneliness:

Yes, Leila sleeps beneath the wave,

But his shall be a redder grave;

Her spirit pointed well the steel

Which taught that felon heart to feel…

***

I watched my time, I leagued with these,

The traitor in his turn to seize;

My wrath is wreaked, the deed is done,

And now I go – but go alone."

The man without roots, homeland, the so-called “at home with the foreigners and stranger with the native ones”, the Giaour is suffering for those he lost and those that had passed away and his soul is destined for the vampire’s fate, bringing grief for the generations of descendants. As for Hassan, his death will be justified:

The very name of Nazarene Was wormwood to his Paynim spleen. Ungrateful fool! since but for brands Well wielded in some hardy hands, And wounds by Galileans given — The surest pass to Turkish heaven — For him his Houris still might wait Impatient at the Prophet's gate.

Final episodes of the poem bring us to the Christian monastery, where one stranger lives for already seven years. Having brought generous gifts for the abbot, he was accepted to live in this community, but the monks keep away from him, are somewhat afraid of him. The extract below, the Giaour's deathbed confession to the abbot of the monastery, makes an interesting comparison with Manfred's dying speech to an abbot in a much more dramatic display of Byronism four years later:

"Father! thy days have passed in peace,       'Mid counted beads, and countless prayer; To bid the sins of others cease,       Thyself without a crime or care, Save transient ills that all must bear, Has been thy lot from youth to age; And thou wilt bless thee from the rage Of passions fierce and uncontrolled, Such as thy penitents unfold, Whose secret sins and sorrows rest Within thy pure and pitying breast. My days, though few, have passed below In much of Joy, but more of Woe; Yet still in hours of love or strife, I've 'scaped the weariness of Life: Now leagued with friends, now girt by foes, I loathed the languor of repose. Now nothing left to love or hate, No more with hope or pride elate, I'd rather be the thing that crawls Most noxious o'er a dungeon's walls, Than pass my dull, unvarying days, Condemned to meditate and gaze

Bearing a burden of sin, he reproaches himself not for the Hassan’s death, but for Leila’s being not alive. Caring for her and pride, even after her death, were the only things keeping him alive, not giving him right to commit a suicide...and also his visioning of his love sometimes:

I saw her — friar! and I rose Forgetful of our former woes; And rushing from my couch, I dart, And clasp her to my desperate heart; I clasp — what is it that I clasp? No breathing form within my grasp, No heart that beats reply to mine — Yet, Leila! yet the form is thine! And art thou, dearest, changed so much As meet my eye, yet mock my touch? Ah! were thy beauties e'er so cold, I care not — so my arms enfold The all they ever wished to hold. Alas! around a shadow prest They shrink upon my lonely breast; Yet still 'tis there! In silence stands, And beckons with beseeching hands! With braided hair, and bright-black eye — I knew 'twas false — she could not die!

Biding farewell, the Giaour asks the stranger to send his far friend, long havinf forseen his tragic fate, a ring – a small token of their friendship – and to bury him without any signature, giving him oblivion and peace:

"In earlier days, and calmer hours,

When heart with heart delights to blend,

Where bloom my native valley's bowers,

I had — Ah! have I now? — a friend!

To him this pledge I charge thee send,

Memorial of a youthful vow;