Desert
Date: 2025-03-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Christian fiction; Hermits -- Fiction

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Desert

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Title: Desert

A legend

Author: Martin Armstrong

Illustrator: Eric Ravilious

Release date: March 24, 2025 [eBook #75705]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1926

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESERT ***

DESERT

A Legend

By

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

Author of
"At the Sign of the Goat & Compasses"

Woodcuts by
E. RAVILIOUS

NEW YORK AND LONDON
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1926

DESERT: A Legend

Copyright, 1916, by
HARPER & BROTHERS
Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition

H—A

Note--

The basis of this story lies in a brief tale occurring in the Syriac version of Palladius's Histories of the Fathers, which is to be found in a beautiful English translation in Sir Ernest Wallis Budge's book The Paradise of the Holy Fathers. I have derived many other incidents and a great mass of details from the same work, but this story is otherwise imaginary in the sense that I have troubled little about historical or topographical accuracy. The quotations from Plotinus and Proclus are from Thomas Taylor's translations, which, for reasons entirely unphilosophical, I have altered in one or two places.

M. A.

DESERT: A Legend

Chapter
One

It was not long past noon when Malchus, son of one of the foremost families of Alexandria, stepped out of his porch into the street. Everybody in the house was asleep; no one but the doorkeeper saw him go out. The street, too, was deserted. The arid heat of it struck against the sense like sounding brass. Its north side blazed with adamantine sunlight; its left was a long wedge-shaped trough of shade whose upper edge was bounded by the roof-ridges themselves, and the lower by their shadows zigzagging sharp-edged down the center of the paved roadway. Halfway down the street, on the shady side, two scavenger dogs were prowling, meekly sniffing the walls and pavement. A kite, small as a moth, sailed in the illimitable blue above. Malchus felt as if he had suddenly flung off a stifling cloak, dropped it from his shoulders and abandoned it in the street behind him. How easy it was, in the mood he was in, to discard relatives, friends, house, possessions, habits—all the material and spiritual accumulation of the past. In stepping from his house door he had stepped into a new life as easily as a swimmer dives from marble into water. The dogs, with tails down and lowered heads, slunk away at his approach and he turned the street corner and made for the southern boundary of the city. "Gone!" he said to himself, thinking of his house and the familiar street, and it seemed to him wonderful and unbelievable that he would never see them again. "Never again!" He tried in vain to realize the meaning of it and as he did so two stabs of pain shot through his heart. One was the memory of his mother making its desperate appeal—her hands, the calm, pure modeling of her temples, a sharp accidental pathos that came with her way of saying certain words; the other, keener, more cruel, more soul-shaking, was the memory of Helena, branded irremediably into every sense.

He halted, rooted to the spot in the molten sunshine, his right hand convulsively grasping his staff, and behind him, on the white wall to his left, the cowled black shadow which like the ghost of his past had dogged him, now on this side, now on that, from the moment he had left the shade of his house, paused, waiting to follow him. With a great effort he blotted from his mind those agonizing appeals, and man and following shadow moved on together. Soon they had emerged from the streets and, leaving the main road to Lake Mareotis, had turned into one of the many paths through the vineyards which spread to the shore of the lake. The heat, there, had lost something of its heaviness. Though the lake was not yet visible, the sense of it refreshed and sweetened the air, and the disheveled garlands of vines festooned from tree to tree shed a soft litter of shadows along the paths. Soon through the long ranks of tree trunks and foliage he caught sight of the live sparkle of water and, after that, great tracts of glassy surface, gray with heat, came gradually into view. His hope was to reach the lake before the hermit, who had visited him a few hours ago, had crossed it. If he did so, he would certainly discover him on the next ship that sailed; but if the hermit crossed the lake ahead of him, it might be many hours before Malchus could follow, and, once he had entered the desert, it would be impossible to trace him. But the hermit had not had more than three hours' start and he must have taken longer to reach the lake than Malchus, who had walked rapidly. Now his path left the vineyard and emerged between two warehouses on to the wharf that edged the lake. Not the faintest breath stirred the sultry air. Malchus looked anxiously out across the water. Far as the eye could reach, its vast, featureless monotony was unbroken. It was impossible, then, that the hermit could have left the shore, for in such weather no ship could sail or be rowed out of sight in three hours.

At its left extremity the wharf swung outward into a jetty which formed a small harbor, but its right end broke off in an abrupt wall and thence the shore of the lake curved away westward, the vineyards encroaching almost to its white, sandy margin.

Malchus turned to the left toward the harbor. A mast rose above the level of the wharf and he walked along the stone embankment to inquire whether a ship would soon be starting. After walking fifty yards he crossed to the edge where a flight of steps descended to the level of the water, and found himself looking down into a ship lying alongside the wharf immediately under him. Seen from above, it looked strangely broad for its length. The great sail lay rolled up along the deck and five or six oars were shipped along each gunwale. Among coils of rope and piles of wooden cases a few men, leaning forward so that their backs and heads almost hid their limbs, moved like slow, heavy beetles. Malchus shouted down his inquiries, and one of the men straightened himself and turned up a round, coppery face.

"We start in an hour," he shouted back. "The master'll be here before long and you can fix up with him. It'll be slow work." He waved an arm to the sky. "All rowing to-day, worse luck!"

Having got this information, Malchus strolled up the wharf toward the other end. He wished to discover the hermit without being discovered by him, for he was determined not to approach him until they entered the desert. Now, therefore, as he paced along the wharf, he examined the shadowy nooks between the warehouses in the hope that he might discover him sheltering from the heat. But the nooks were as empty as the wharf itself and soon Malchus was approaching its western extremity. As he did so he became suddenly convinced that he was on the point of discovering the hermit, and, sure enough, as he reached the edge and glanced along the sandy shore, he caught sight of a small bare-legged figure seated on the white sand not more than fifty yards away. He had avoided the green shade of the vineyard a few yards behind him and sat immovable in the full glare of the sun, like a god carved out of wood. The sun was high, and his squat shadow lay like a black bowlder behind him.

Malchus moved into a shady nook between two sheds and rested there till it was almost time to go back to the harbor. Then glancing cautiously from his hiding-place, he saw that the hermit was coming toward him and soon he must have climbed on to the wharf, for Malchus saw a small gnome-like shadow slide across the bright gap between the sheds. He waited a little and then himself came out into the glare. The slim figure of the hermit was by this time more than halfway down the long line of the wharf—the only vertical thing followed by the only shadow in all the horizontal glare. Malchus followed him slowly. When he reached the harbor the hermit was already squatting in the bows of the boat with his cowl over his head.

Malchus found a place for himself on deck in a patch of shadow cast by a pile of cargo. The great wall of golden stone which towered above the side of the ship threw off the afternoon heat like a stove; the heaps of wooden cases beside him exhaled a hot aromatic smell and across it there came another smell, the flat, earthy smell of shallow water. Malchus closed his eyes. A feeling of utter serenity possessed him. The noise and movement of the crew about him served only to increase his sense of calm isolation. Nothing of this stress and bustle concerned him; for him there was nothing to do but to sit still. The ropes would be loosed, the ship would be pushed off from the wharf by men sweating at long poles, the harbor would recede, and the oarsmen settle, with the rumble of wood on wood, to their long, monotonous labor at the oars; and through it all—through the long smooth crossing of the lake unchanging except for the slow transition from afternoon to evening, evening to darkness and darkness back to dawn, sunrise and sultry noon—he would have nothing to do but sit with eyes open or closed, contemplating the ebb and flow of his thoughts and feelings.

A silence in the hubbub of preparation roused him: the moment for departure had arrived, and at a shout from the master the crew began to thrust away the ship from the harbor wall. Slowly the wall receded. Two oarsmen in the bows were already churning up the glassy harbor water and soon the ship glided out into the lake.

A plain of shimmering gray lay before them, but behind them the gray brightened to a milky blue where the shallows ran up on to the white margins, and in the shallows companies of flamingoes stood like long-stemmed rosy lilies, dreaming immovably upon the fainter rose of their reflections. Malchus gazed at them, and the thought came to him that each was a symbol of man contemplating the God in himself. The rowers began a rhythmical chant, swinging monotonously to their oars. Malchus closed his eyes. That chant and the rhythmical forward lurch of the ship were all he knew of the outward world; and after an hour the chanting ceased and his world dimmed to the heave of the boat and the regular plash and gurgle of the cloven water. He shut out all thought from his mind. He did not even try to determine what he would say to the hermit when he revealed himself to him in the desert, nor did he examine his feelings, desires, or beliefs. Whether or not his reason accepted Christ he did not inquire. He was passionately determined to submit himself without reservation, body and soul: therefore, he could not be troubled to reason about his belief. The idea of God and of his son Jesus Christ was burnt into his emotional life. It had been his intellect only—the intellect of an impetuous youth—which had rejected it. Now the elegant logical structure of his disbelief had collapsed before the emotional storm through which he was passing, and the old idea had flowered again upon the ruins. The words spoken by the hermit during their conversation a few hours ago had come to him as a revelation:—"We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning." That was the state of mind after which he had always been unconsciously striving. What a relief it was now to abandon all the troublesome mechanism of argument and explanation, to allow to impulse and emotion the authority for which, with him, they had hitherto always appealed in vain. He felt himself free at last. Never again would he submit to the imposture of logic. But it was no sluggish serenity into which he had escaped. The mind and the soul must, he knew, be disciplined, for only thus could they attain to perfect freedom. And now, as he sat on the deck with closed eyes, assuming already by an unconscious imitation the attitude of the hermit, he drew his attention inward, retiring into that innermost chamber of being which is one with the eternal and divine. At first his contemplation was disturbed by intruding memories and once he found himself spinning a long fantasy about Helena. How would she receive the news of his disappearance? He pictured her in tears, imploring his pardon too late. The picture gave him a fierce appeasement and his lips twisted into a grim smile.

The physical sensation of that smile roused him. How was he to master this idle wandering of the mind? For a moment he was overcome by discouragement, but soon he had lulled himself back into contemplation, and gradually his mind, wearied by the emotions of the day, threw off the burden of intruding cares....

He must have sat thus for many hours, for when he again opened his eyes he was astounded to find himself in darkness. Everything about him, the mast, the ropes, the piles of cargo, stood out sharply in planes and edges of frosty white, the rowers were modeled in flickering black and silver as they swung to and fro, and looking upward, Malchus saw a full moon, small, brilliant, and immeasurably high. Beside him lay a pool of blond silver light, so bright that it seemed as if it were itself the source of light. Everywhere it was as though the moonward faces of things were coated with phosphorus. The air had grown deliciously cool; a draught stirred about the deck as if the lake were breathing. Then a shout sounded above the noise of rowing and the rowers leaned back motionless upon their oars. There was silence above and below except for the clucking of water against the ship's still-moving sides and the tapping of a rope against the mast. The wind was freshening. Again a shout out of the darkness, and, with bumping of wood on wood, the rowers shipped their oars and then lined up along the sail, while others loosened the ropes at the mast. When all was ready there came another shout and the great sail swung up, huge as a house side, shivered and fluttered heavily in the wind, and then, as the ship came round, yawned out into a great dark cavern. The ship lurched slowly over, and growing up slowly out of the silence the hiss of moving water was heard along the sides.

Chapter
Two

The breeze which had sprung up during the night had weakened after daybreak, and now it had died away completely. It was almost noon. The men were once again sweating at the oars, but their labor would soon be over, for the southern shore of the lake was clearly in sight. Pale golden hills extending in horizontal terraces bounded the distance; along their bases the richer gold of the desert was barred by deep blue belts of palmgrove. Eastward, within a stone's throw of the ship, flights of wild-duck with their necks strained forward skimmed the face of the water. Many hours before, Malchus had awakened from a deep sleep to find himself afloat between the pale-green mirrors of sky and water in which the stars had faded to blurs of faint white radiance. He was cold and very hungry and had bought a loaf and a small mug of wine from one of the crew. He had drunk the wine and eaten a piece of the loaf, putting the remainder away into his pouch. Already it seemed an age since that early waking; to remember it in the noonday heat was to recall early spring in the height of summer. As for his previous life—the life which yesterday at this hour he was still living—it had receded into the remote past. It was as if the voyage across the lake had carried him into another world and separated him by many years from the self of yesterday. The crisis, crowned by his momentous decision, had come so suddenly....

Yet it was only a few hours ago, hardly a day and a half, that he had dined at the house of his friend Diocles, the poet. The feast had been a splendid one—splendid not only for its food and wines, but for its company and their talk. But by an hour after midnight the guests, though none of them had yet risen from his couch to depart, had long ceased to eat and, all except a few, even to drink. On the tables stood dishes of grapes, figs, and pomegranates, and crystal wine flasks and cups, but the guests had turned away from the tables, and the confused din of voices, glasses, silver, and the soft padding of the slaves' feet upon the marble floor had died down. There was no longer any general conversation, but isolated gusts of talk rose and relapsed, the tones now deep, now high, now rippling upward in a woman's laughter, like flutes, oboes, and bassoons played at random.

The host was Diocles, the poet, a splendid young man, easy mannered, imperturbable, with broad shoulders, pointed golden beard, and gray eyes which could be strangely piercing or, by a curious change, gentle and dreamy as though their gaze had been turned inward. He had been trying to engage the friend on his right in a philosophical discussion, but in vain, for Malchus replied briefly and fell back again into the gloomy abstraction in which he had passed the evening, his head propped on his right hand, his large eyes scowling at the floor. From this position he never moved except sometimes to steal a furtive glance at a woman who reclined at another table.

She was young and of an extraordinary beauty. Her profile in repose had the dreaming loveliness of a marble goddess, but when she laughed or spoke she was suddenly transformed into another creature, and, as if for the first time, the vivid colors of eyes, lips, and beautiful teeth flashed into life. Helena was her name; she was known throughout Alexandria for her beauty, her great wealth, and the proud independence of her manner of life. Both her wealth and her beauty brought her many offers of marriage, but to each she was accustomed to reply that it would be time enough to think of husbands when she had grown tired of lovers. Now she was flirting with a very young man who sprawled on the floor beside her couch and leaned his head back against its cushioned edge, gazing up at her as he talked. His head was covered with crisp golden curls and he had the full and regular features which so often accompany an amiable but stupid character. Sometimes detachedly, as though she were inspecting a fur, Helena stretched out a white arm and slowly stroked the boy's head, watching the tight curls spring up as they escaped from the weight of her moving hand. Then she would shoot a quick glance at Malchus, wrapped in his sulks, and when her eyes returned to her boy their vague and contemplative gaze showed that she was not paying the slightest attention to what he was saying.

On the next couch lay an old man with a smooth, fat face and a bald head which he wiped from time to time with a yellow silk handkerchief. The richness of his dress gave a certain majesty to a heavy and bloated body. He had the glazed eye of one who has drunk heavily and he was making vague, fumbling gestures with one hand, as if he were trying to drive away a fly. But he was not driving away a fly; he was beckoning, and at last a girl ran up and stood beside his couch. She was small and slim, with the pure, flower-like face of a child.

"Come here, Thaïs, you little imp. Why have you been avoiding me all night?" He spoke indistinctly; his consonants were causing him some trouble, and when he reached out a heavy arm the girl shrank back laughing. But soon she had submitted and sat down on his couch and allowed him to put his arm about her.

At that moment Helena rose and, as though she were the controlling force of the whole company, the sound of voices broke off sharp and everyone looked at her. She moved toward her host with the slow, exquisite poise of one to whom even walking is a conscious art. Her robe of silver tissue embroidered with blue and crimson leopards enhanced with its shining surfaces the forms and motions of her beautiful, supple body.

And with her departure everyone became aware that the feast was over. Like a soundless tide the large silence of the night, of which the guests had recently been so oblivious, subtly took possession of the room, broken rarely by a murmured phrase, a giggle of laughter from one of the girls, or the snores of a sleeping feaster which rose from time to time out of the silence, soared up gradually and formidably, and exploded with a snort which aroused the sleeper to a fretful change of position. But over each interruption the silence closed like a flood, and audible in it, as if an integral part of it, streamed the cold, airy rush of a fountain, faintly seen like a silver ghost in the deep-blue hollow of the courtyard. Softly and incessantly it hissed, a silence grown audible. But to one who listened intently, small, clear sounds emerged from the pervading hush; sometimes a tiny spark shot with a crackle like the snapping of a cane splinter from one of the steady lamp flames and four pure musical notes made by water dripping from a leak in the fountain pipe into the basin below, repeated their little tune with monotonous persistence.

At the departure of Helena, Malchus had stirred himself on his couch with a long sigh. Her going had eased the intolerable oppression which had tormented him, as if with an insomnia of the nerves, all evening. Now he had sunk into a deep revery when a voice close beside him startled him into consciousness. "Like a fire that has burned itself out!" said the voice. It was the voice of Diocles, but when Malchus turned his head it seemed to him that Diocles had been talking to himself, for he was looking, not at him, but at the rows of feasters silent on their couches.

"What has burned itself out?" asked Malchus.

The poet turned to him. "The feast, Malchus," he said, with a gesture which included the whole room. "Look! Life here is frozen, suspended as in a marble sculpture. At every feast I am conscious of this moment when the feast has burned itself out. I watch for it, for when it comes I feel that I am seeing more deeply into this clouded pool of life. Don't ask me what I see, because I can't tell you. What I see speaks to the emotions, not to the reason, and so it can never be expressed except in poetry. But do you not feel that some larger and more enduring power has entered the room and superseded the small, isolated activities of all these helpless folk—helpless now because of drunkenness or sleep, but just as helpless when they are laughing, chattering, eating, drinking, and making love? This moment shows us human life in a truer perspective. It teaches us who are awake to it patience, resignation, love, and pity. I picture men as fish in the sea suspended in the middle waters halfway between the sea floor and the boundary of the bright upper world, and occupied solely with feeding, playing, fighting, and reproducing their kind. But when they rest from those activities the greater number sink, drawn down by their own density, to the empty darkness below; but a few, buoyed up by some bladder in the heart or brain which is filled with a divine air, float upward to the surface and afterward return to the middle waters with their heads filled with dreams of sunsparks, starlight, vast moving shadows, and a boundless dome of blue."

Diocles paused, and before he could continue, a voice broke, profanely loud, upon the stillness of the night. It was a young man who had lain long on his back, sleeping with half-open mouth and firmly grasping an empty wine cup in his right hand. He had awakened suddenly out of a drunken sleep, and was calling for wine. "Wine, boy! Wine! Come, fill up!" he shouted, hoarsely. But his shout disturbed no one and the sound of it vanished like a gaudy bird into the silence of the court. The slaves had long since fallen asleep on their bench in a corner of the hall, and even if they had been awake, the young man had turned feverishly on to his side and fallen asleep again before they could have filled his cup.

Diocles indicated the occurrence with a humorous shrug, and then, turning to Malchus, appealed to him more personally. "I wish I could teach you to be a poet, Malchus," he said.

Malchus smiled and shook his head. "The arts are not for me."

"Perhaps not. But when I said I wished to turn you into a poet I did not mean that I wished you to write poetry. God forbid! There are too many of us writing it already. I meant that I wished you to live poetically. I wish even that I could turn you into a philosopher. That at least would be a stage on the way to becoming a poet; for a philosophic creed is good as a temporary discipline, though it kills in the end. It is good while it feeds the emotions, but if we persist in it for its own sake we pinion our souls with ropes made out of withered truths. We must never allow the philosophers and sages to enslave us; on the contrary, we must use them as our servants. Nor must we allow life, any more than philosophy, to enslave us, for we must retain the mastery of our senses. The end of life is the perfect development of our faculties. If we allow life to enslave us through our senses and desires we resign the control of ourselves to blind chance and become like dead leaves in the whirlwind, helpless in the face of adversity, like you, my poor Malchus. That is what I mean by living poetically. It is something more than living philosophically. It is to be open to every influence from outside and to extend our knowledge deeper and deeper inward into our own being."

"We shall never agree, Diocles. This careful self-control which you preach is no good to me. It limits experience. How can we ever know if we shut our field of discovery within such narrow bounds? It is only by abandoning ourselves to life that we can live fully."

"And whither does your abandonment lead you, my friend? Have you been living fully to-night? No; you have spent the last six hours tortured by jealousy and despair. That is not living, it is dying. Let me be your physician. Come and live here for a month or two and I will put you through a discipline which will help you to regain control of yourself."

"Control of myself? If you could teach me how to forget myself it would be more to the purpose."

"I will teach you how to forget Helena, which will be more to the purpose still."

"How simple it seems to you, Diocles. But you, with your golden mean and your carefully ordered life, cannot realize the intensity of a passion such as mine for Helena. It is branded into my heart. What can your rules and disciplines do for that? You must not bring philosophy and poetry, but a knife, if you want to doctor me. I am done for, like a fire which has burned itself out, as you said just now with an unintentional aptness which startled me."

"Done for? But, my dear Malchus, Helena was not your first love. You recovered from the others."

"They were different. I was younger then and I did not take them so seriously."

"On the contrary, I should say that you took them more seriously because more sanely. The disaster of your affair with Helena is that you have not taken it seriously enough. Love is a perilous and explosive thing, like fire. If you do not take fire seriously it will devour life instead of warming and illuminating it."

Malchus shook his head. "In the difference between our use of the word serious, Diocles, lies the whole difference between our two minds."

"Then, in your own terms, Malchus—try to take love less seriously. Try in your next love affair to be frivolous."

"I have done with love affairs, Diocles. I am sick to death of this sort of life." He included the hall, the tables, and the recumbent guests in a sweep of the arm.

"For the moment, Malchus," Diocles assented. "But in a few weeks, when this amatory wound has healed, you will be reconciled to it once more, for whatever else this civilization of ours has done, it has at least produced the ideal mode of life for a cultured mind."

"Yes, and it is just this mode of life and this culture of the mind which I have come to hate. You are going to say, Diocles, that jealousy or love-sickness has poisoned my mind. I deny it. It has not poisoned my mind, it has opened my eyes. The life we lead is futile, both bodily and mentally. We boast of our broad-mindedness, but really we have a mind for nothing. We believe in nothing except not believing in anything. We dabble in all the religions and philosophies and select the little bits that please us from each of them, like children picking up colored shells on the beach."

"But, my dear Malchus, is not that the true wisdom? For thus we allow our minds to nourish themselves naturally, like our bodies, giving them a variety of foods and leaving it to them to select from each the vital principle and to excrete the rest. To be bound to one philosophy or one religion alone is the mark of a narrow mind."

"Only if we bind ourselves to it from idleness or cowardice, or for some such unworthy reason. But the man who has made one religion or philosophy a part of himself is not bound; he is freed. He has gained a means of self-expression and has concentrated his emotional life into a full channel instead of squandering it, as we do, in a hundred trivial driblets. We refined and cultured folk have no beliefs, no worthy enthusiasms, no prejudices."

"No prejudices? But I thought we had agreed years ago that to rid ourselves of prejudices was the first step on the path of wisdom."

"We did, Diocles; and a more foolish idea, it seems to me now, could not be conceived. Without prejudices our lives are empty, all the fury has gone out of them."

"Fury, my dear Malchus? Well, you may have my share of fury. I have no desire to return to the condition of a wild beast."

"It would be better for us if we were more like wild beasts."

"Well, you are not unlike one at present, if that is any consolation to you. But explain yourself, my friend."

"I have already said what I mean, which is that this cultured, sophisticated life takes all the vigor out of us. And not only out of our minds, but out of our bodies, too. What does it leave for our bodies to do? Nothing. We have limbs and muscles, strong and aching to be used, yet if we wish to use them we must squander their energies in some artificial occupation like games or hunting. Real life ought to tax body, mind, and soul. It should be a contest, not a series of elegant postures."

"Well, each according to his taste, my friend. But this mood of yours will pass off in time. It is simply the result of your present unhappiness. Meanwhile, since you feel the need of physical exercise, why not try a few days of this despised hunting? It would distract your mind as well as exercising your body, and if you have reasonably good sport you will soon lose sight of the artificiality of it."

The two friends had almost forgotten that they were not alone, but now a movement on one of the couches interrupted their talk. One of the girls had stirred and awakened. It was Thaïs, who had fallen asleep on old Chronius's couch. She sat up bewildered, with disheveled hair and shining eyes, lovely as a naiad rising from a pool. Then realizing her surroundings she looked down in disgust at the fat sleeping face of Chronius and, stretching out her hand to the table, she took one by one four purple grape skins from his plate and stuck them carefully on his nose, his chin, and his cheeks. Chronius shivered and opened his eyes. "Don't! Don't! They're wet!" he mumbled, making groping movements with his hands. But Thaïs held down his hands, so that he could not brush off the grape skins, and immediately he fell asleep again. Then with an indignant little shake of her shoulders she rose and, smoothing her hair with one hand, came toward Diocles and Malchus.

"Tell me, Thaïs," asked Diocles, rising as she approached and putting an arm round her shoulders, "have you enjoyed yourself?"

"No, I haven't," replied Thaïs, without hesitation.

"Then my feast has been a failure."

Thaïs looked at him intently. "That is a polite lie, Diocles. I do wish that everybody would not treat me as a child to whom one must always be offering sweets."

"But what I said was not a lie, Thaïs. I meant it."

"How could you mean it? You're not in love with me. Why, then, am I so important?"

"Because, my dear, you are young and innocent."

"Innocent?" replied Thaïs, with a wry smile.

"Yes, Thaïs, quite innocent. And youth and innocence are the most beautiful and touching things in the world. If I were told that any of these others had not enjoyed themselves—any except Gelasia, who is young and innocent like yourself, or Malchus here, who is my special friend—I should be horribly annoyed, because it would show that I had been found wanting in the art of hospitality. It would be as bad as if my poetry had been accused of technical weaknesses. But when I hear that you have not enjoyed yourself, it does not annoy me; it pains me, and it is much more serious to be pained than to be annoyed. Annoyance is of the mind, but it is the heart that is pained. But tell me why you have not enjoyed yourself."

Thaïs hung her head and was silent. After a moment she raised a face in which shone the ingenuous seriousness of youth.

"It's always the same," she said. "I never know till afterward that I have not enjoyed myself. I thought I was enjoying myself to-night."

"You were, dear child. I watched you."

"Yes, perhaps I was. I didn't mind even when that old pig Chronius beckoned me over to his couch. But he touched me and stroked me too much and I felt a sudden rage and smacked his face. Then I felt ashamed, and I was nicer to him than I wanted to be, to make up for it. However, he fell asleep soon, and suddenly I too felt sleepy, so sleepy that I just settled down against him—feeling that he was a bolster, you know, not a human being—and went off to sleep with my head on his chest. But when I woke up just now and saw where I was and saw his horrid old swollen face, I was, oh, shriveled up with disgust. That's why I stuck the grape skins on his face. It was not for fun; it was from fury, just as one might smudge an ugly painting. And now I'm going. But before I go I'll tell you one thing. You are the only man whose arm I could bear to have round me at present; and that's a very great compliment, Diocles."

Chapter
Three

Half an hour later, Malchus was walking home, followed by his servant. It was the moment of the false dawn. In that pale, watery air, the familiar streets had changed their nature; they were hollow and desolate, the humanity frozen out of them. No mortal hands had made them; they had been grooved and sculptured by the slow labor of natural forces, like the channels of some deep-sunk, faintly luminous coral reef. In marble walls and colonnades, as they loomed up toward the walking Malchus, there was a dull, milky glow as though a veiled flame lurked within their substance. Overhead, stars showed their faint, frosty sparkle, in a limpid steel-blue sky. Not a breath rustled the palm trees and the tall rose-bays whose fantastic shapes spired up above the garden walls; but as he passed an iron gate his sense was caught by the subtle perfume of a flowering jasmine, which spread its invisible snare across his path, and his heart suddenly contracted with pain. Further on, as he turned a corner, a faint draught smelling of the sea touched his face, and he saw beneath him, like two polished shields, the glimmering expanse of the two harbors with the Island of Pharos spread along their further rim in a long violet mound on which, here and there, a light twinkled. Far in the distance, from two different quarters, bright shafts of sound shot upward alternatively and were lost; two cocks were challenging each other in the silence, and Malchus felt that if he had opened his lips and spoken out aloud the passionate appeals which oppressed his heart, he would have heard, after a moment of listening, the voice of Helena answering him far and clear across the city....

"Helena, my beloved, listen to me at least, before you leave me. I cannot live without you any more than a man can live without his own heart. Though I still speak and move my limbs like other men, the soul within me is dying as surely as the body dies. I am the empty shell of a man, a moving cenotaph filled only with misery. Be merciful, beloved, even if you no longer love me. It cannot be that I have no meaning for you, no part in you, or how should I feel this intensity of pain? Helena, I could be content, even if you never spoke to me nor looked at me, if only you would give your body back to me. My mind, my senses are full of you; they have forgotten everything else. My sense of touch remembers only the shape and smoothness and warmth of your body, my sight its lines and curves and colors. They are burned into me, branded indelibly. Even when I die they will remain; and if, when all our generation is dead, men open my coffin, they will find not my decaying body, but yours, perfect and warm and ready to awake from sleep."

The cocks had ceased to crow; silence, like a clear and fragile bubble, inclosed the whole world. Then pure and small from the eastward came the voice of Helena:

"My foolish Malchus! I have been waiting for you ever since I left the feast of Diocles. Do you not remember how I always loved to tease you? You used to praise me for it afterward, because of the wonderful renewal of our love which always came with our reconciliation. And so, during this last month I have only been playing with you. Did you imagine that I could exchange that stupid young Heronion for you whom I have loved so long? Come back, my foolish one: I will not torment you any longer."

A sparrow fluttered from the wall above him and Malchus awoke to find that in the preoccupation of his daydream he had stopped and was now leaning against the pillar of a porch. His servant was standing a few paces behind him, surprised and troubled by his strange behavior. The houses were now clearly visible; each had taken on its familiar individuality. Color had come back into the trees and the flowers which festooned the walls and porticoes and heaped their mounds of color about the fountains in the squares. In half an hour the sun would rise. Malchus, the pain at his heart dulled a little by his hopeless imaginings, went on his way and, entering the house in which he had lived ever since, four years ago, he had left the home of his parents, lay down on his bed.....

He slept for five hours and awoke to confused memories of dreams. His mind, still unresigned to despair, had projected its agony into visionary struggles. At first he could remember nothing clearly, but his heart retained, like a scar, a sense of thwartings, disappointments, huge obstacles encountered but never overcome. Then details began to return to him. Helena, vivid and desirable as in her most ardent moments, had leaned to him with outstretched arms from an upper window, and knowing that he was on the brink of the solution of all his miseries, he had hurried to the door of the house. It opened and he entered. But indoors the house was empty and ruinous and he never found the upper chamber from which Helena had leaned. He wandered from room to room vainly seeking for her, but whenever he tried to get out of a room the door had vanished and he searched desperately along walls of solid stone. Once Helena's voice called him clearly and urgently from the next room, and after desperate gropings for an exit he climbed perilously up the face of the wall, clinging to projecting stones, and, pulling himself up to the top, dropped over the other side. But there he found himself in another doorless inclosure. Again Helena's voice called to him, but further away now, and the same terrible struggle began again. It seemed to him now, as he sat on the edge of his bed, a relief to have escaped from that frenzied striving. His waking mind was frozen and empty. The fire had gone out of his pain now; it had become a cold, dull ache, and he remembered Diocles' phrase of "a fire that had burned itself out." But with the name of Diocles, the memory of last night's feast returned and Malchus found that an unappeasable hatred of that life of refined luxury had entered into him. Its hollowness—the trivial culture, the aimless contentment, the mumming and miming, the little rules for gestures and speech which formed its code of good manners—sickened him. He knew that he could never take part in it again, but he did not realize that this sudden fierceness against a mode of life which he had willingly tolerated for years was merely the blind vengeance of his shattered passions....

The process of bathing and dressing seemed to him now a tedious thing, but it was a thing which had become a part of his life and he submitted to it and controlled his anger at the restless movements of the slaves about him, enduring patiently until they should have finished.

At last it was ended; but with nothing more to distract and anger him, he found himself face to face again with the awful emptiness of his life. A sudden bitterness, like a poisonous spring, flooded his soul at the thought that there was no longer any motive for this careful cleansing and beautifying. In the old days, this moment of the completion of his toilet had been full of delightful anticipation. Refreshed and invigorated by sleep and with the heaviness of sleep dispelled and body and mind warm and tingling from the touch of warm water and the unguents with which he had been rubbed, he had contemplated the day that lay before him with an ever renewed sense of adventure. During the last two years his love affair with Helena had raised this daily pleasure to an ecstasy, for then he had known that each day held for him the delicious and almost magical renewal of their love. It was some months ago that he had first become aware of a change in their relations. In what the change consisted he could not exactly have said: a faint, indefinable discord had sounded through the perfect harmony of their love. From that moment their ardor had declined until Helena's feeling for him had passed from indifference to something not far from hatred. How had it started? Malchus did not know. But of this, at least, he was sure—it had not started with him. No sooner had he asserted this than a doubt rang a small silver bell in his mind and he became conscious of things which he had not admitted to himself before—of little failures, disappointments, wearinesses which had begun, some months ago, to creep into his rapture. Their passion, formerly so triumphantly effortless, had, it seemed, reached a limit which could not be passed, and from that moment it was no longer a wonderful still-renewed adventure, but a desperate reiteration of the physical. And with this flagging of their passion he had begun to be aware of a sense of stress, failure, emptiness, for which the union of their minds could not compensate. Weariness of the flesh had begun to assail him. But he had never confessed these things to Helena, for he could not have expressed them in words; and, even if he had been able to, he would not have dared, for, in spite of them, he still desired her. His desire possessed him like a hunger, undiminished, and as he watched her gradually receding from him the hunger only became the more fierce. No, his love had not diminished; it was hers that had failed them. And as he again came round to the unendurable thought that Helena no longer loved him, bitterness overwhelmed him and he sat staring again at the empty desolation of his life. By degrees he came to feel that all love of women was a hateful thing, a thing of feverish and restless longing whose brief fulfillment always fell short of the hoped-for ecstasy. Perhaps the weak and clumsy body was incapable of achieving that passion of which the soul dreamed. He thought of older loves in the days before he had met Helena, and he told himself now, in his cold, clear-sighted mood, that his love for Helena was not the supreme passion of his life. It was merely one of many. Each of his loves in turn he had proclaimed to be the supreme passion; that was the illusion by which the fancy always strove to cheat the soul into a disregard of the sure disappointment. Each, as he saw it now, had begun with this parade of flattering delusions, this intoxication which turned a girl into a creature of more than mortal perfection and a brief quickening of the pulses into an undying ecstasy, and he recalled the heartache of that first moment when his eyes met the cold eyes of disillusion, the sickening weariness of the attempt to pretend that all was still as wonderful as it had been before. Yes, it was hateful and vile, this itch for the impossible which no experience could cure. Yet even if the dream were realized, what would it be worth? An ecstasy of sensation made permanent would be an agony, a destruction for both body and soul; it would be a thing more terrible than this disillusionment and disgust which tortured him now....

It was the hour when he had been in the habit of listening to music or the reading of poetry or philosophy, and now his musicians and the Greek who was his reader approached to receive his orders. He sent the musicians away, for he could not have endured the emotional excitement of even the most sober music, but he retained his reader, who began to unroll the epic poem from which, during the last week, he had been reading to Malchus every morning. But Malchus waved it away.

"Not poetry to-day, Chalchas," he said. "Read me rather some philosophy; but not at length, for I cannot attend to arguments to-day. Read me fragments—passages which will soothe me and help to banish thought. I cannot choose. Choose, yourself, what you think best."

The slave went out and returned with two or three books and a stool, and seating himself near Malchus's chair, he unrolled one of the books and began to read. At first Malchus understood nothing. He could not detach his attention from the pulsing nerve of his misery and he heard only the gentle inflexions of the reading voice and the flights of words which dispersed like flocks of sparrows, uncontrolled by any connecting sense. Then with an effort he forced himself to focus his attention and gradually the sounds wove themselves into meaning.

"What is it you are reading about, Chalchas?" he asked.

Chalchas looked up from the scroll. "About eternity, sir," he said.

"'Hence it hastens to be in futurity'"—Malchus repeated the last phrase which still echoed in his memory. "What is it that hastens?"

"The universe, sir."

"Good. Read on from there."

Hence, read Chalchas, it hastens to be in futurity, and is not willing to stop, since it attracts existence to itself, in performing another and another thing, and is moved in a circle through a certain desire of essence. So that we have found what existence is in such natures as these, and also what the cause is of a motion which thus hastens to be perpetually in the future periods of time. But in first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future; for they are now the whole, and whatever of life they ought to possess, they wholly possess, so that they do not seek after anything, because there is not anything which can be added to them in futurity.

The voice read on, but Malchus had ceased to listen. A phrase had caught his attention and he repeated it to himself, feeling somehow a vague consolation in it. In first and blessed natures there is not any desire of the future. Surely it was just in that desire of the future, the desire to continue his possession of Helena, that his present misery consisted. If only he could achieve a state of stability such as the philosopher seemed to be trying to define—a state of peaceful being instead of this endless craving for the unfulfilled. Again he focused his attention on the reading.

What then, if some one should never depart from the contemplation of eternity, but should incessantly persevere in admiring its nature, and should be able to do this through the possession of an unwearied nature; such a one, perhaps, running to eternity, would there stop and never decline from it, in order that he might become similar to it and eternal, surveying eternity, and the eternal by that which is eternal in himself.

Malchus closed his eyes. The words and ideas, only half comprehended by his reason, brought comfort to his heart. He withdrew his mind from Helena and from the pain which obsessed him and concentrated it within upon the pure awareness of being, the eternal in himself. But soon, by no will of his own, his mind had escaped and was clamoring again at the doors behind which Helena had withdrawn herself. How could philosophy help a pain like his? It was beyond the control of will. This beautiful system of thought in which mind broke from the bonds of reason and flowered into ecstasy was accessible only to untroubled minds.

We must think of the soul, Chalchas was reading, as not receiving in the body irrational desires and angers and other passions, but as abolishing all these and as having, as far as possible, no communion with the body.

Chalchas looked up and seeing that Malchus was listening attentively he unrolled more of the scroll and chose another passage.

It is not by running after external things that the soul beholds temperance and justice, but she perceives them in contemplation of herself and of that which she formerly was, and views them like statues set up in herself which time has covered with rust. Then she purifies them, even as if gold had taken unto itself life and, because it was encrusted with earth, perceived not that it was gold and knew not itself; but afterward, shaking off the earth which clung to it, had been filled with wonder to behold itself pure and alone.

As if struck by a sudden thought, Chalchas laid down the book and took up one of the others. As he unrolled it and began to search for the passage he had thought of, Malchus's eyes wandered into the court where a slim fountain leaped from a little grove of flowering plants. The fountain, he thought, was a symbol of that pure being, always vividly alive, yet always unchanging and self-sufficing, which the philosopher vainly tried to define when he wrote of eternity and the soul. Its clear watery music soothed his sense as the voice of Chalchas had done; and as he listened the voice rose, gentle and unobtrusive, again, the words it spoke mixing with the voice of the water. Dissimilar Natures ... The Immortal and the mortal ... The spiritual and that which is deprived of spirit ... The indivisible and that which is broken by division,—the phrases danced like bubbles on the surface of Chalchas's speech, and then Malchus was once again listening attentively. For by reason of all these things there comes upon the soul mighty tumult and labor in the realms of generation, since we pursue a flying mockery which is ever in motion. And the soul, declining to a material life, kindles a light in her dark tenement the body, but she herself is lodged in obscurity; but by giving life to the body she destroys herself and her own spirit in as great a degree as these can suffer destruction. For thus the mortal nature participates in spirit, but the spiritual nature in death, and the whole becomes a prodigy, as Plato beautifully observes in his Laws, composed of the mortal and immortal, of the spiritual, and that which is deprived of the spirit. For the physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life but giver of life to the mortal body.

Malchus raised his hand as a sign that the reading should cease, and the Greek, taking up the books and the stool on which he had been sitting, retired across the court.

Chapter
Four

Malchus remained wrapped in thought till he was roused by the sound of approaching footsteps, and, raising his eyes, saw one of his slaves coming toward him, carrying a long palm-leaf mat which he spread before Malchus saying:

"There is a hermit at the door, sir, with mats and baskets for sale." He stood waiting for Malchus to speak and inspecting the mat critically; and, believing that Malchus was debating whether he should buy the mat or not, he added, "The weaving is unusually good, sir."

But Malchus had not been considering the mat. The news that a hermit selling palm-leaf mats was at his door had strengthened rather than interrupted the train of thought which had occupied him since Chalchas had ceased reading. Malchus knew from the fact the hermit was selling mats and baskets that he must be one of the Christian hermits from the desert. They were familiar figures in Alexandria, for many of them, having tramped across the burning sands till they reached the Nile or the southern bank of Lake Mareotis and having there taken ship, appeared at rare intervals in the city to sell the work of their hands and so earn enough to buy for themselves the bare necessities of life.

Malchus himself, like most of his friends, had been born a Christian and had been christened, for his parents were of orthodox faith. As a child, like many children, he had taken religion very seriously. The ceremonies of the church delighted him: he used to imitate them very accurately in his nursery, repeating portions of the services by heart to the astonishment of his nurse. Later he became a great student of the Scriptures and was much taken up with his own religious experiences and his successful or unsuccessful encounters with sin. The priest who had charge of him predicted a pious future. Then, quite suddenly, at the age of eighteen he changed. Christianity, he discovered, was fit only for children and women. He discarded it and proclaimed himself, with Diocles and the other cultured young men who were his friends, a free thinker with a sympathy for Greek classicism. They formed an exquisite society of their own which, helped by Diocles's growing reputation as a poet, became notorious for its artistic intellectualism, its refined licentiousness, and the extreme elegance of its feasts. But no man can change his nature, and in Malchus there was an impulsiveness, a violence, which was much more in accordance with Christianity than with Greece; and, though he would have been the last to admit it, he retained in his attitude to life the mental habit of a Christian.

But the Christianity of Alexandria, with its endless bickerings and riots, was a very different thing from the Christianity of the desert. Everyone in Alexandria had heard of those strenuous desert monasteries, buried in waterless wastes or high pitched on barren hills, and of the hermits who fled from even that strict and primitive existence and led solitary lives of incredible asceticism in cells built by themselves in the sand-swept wastes of Nitria or far south in the Thebaid. It was not so many years since Saint Anthony himself, the greatest of the hermits, had died at a great age and had been buried in an unknown desert grave, bequeathing his leather tunic and the coverlet of his bed to the bishop Athanasius; and the stories which were still told of his lonely battles against evil spirits and those gnawing temptations which lay hold on men living in solitude, held a strange and profound fascination for the earnest, unquiet, and fanatical heart of Malchus.

The philosophers whom Chalchas had just been reading to him, reduced life to mere thought and contemplation. In spite of the comforting ideas which he had received from them, he had realized, as he reflected on their words, that they could not help him, for his only hope lay in strenuous action, while all they could offer him was thought. The idea of a life of thought, of bodily passivity, terrified Malchus. For one of his violent nature, passivity meant despair; for passivity, he knew, would leave him at the mercy of his misery and his desires. For him action was imperative. He must do, not think, if ever he was to escape from himself and from Helena. He longed to hand over the control of himself to some directing discipline, to slave-drive his body, to tire himself out in some austere bodily labor which should have an arbitrary but supreme significance....

It was thoughts such as these that had leaped, like a sudden light, into his mind when the slave had told him that a hermit stood at his door, and it was for this reason that he roused himself and ordered the slave to invite the hermit to enter.

The slave, leaving the mat where he had laid it, went off to obey, and a few minutes later Malchus, raising his eyes, saw the hermit standing in the court, immovable as a vision. He was an old man, upright and gaunt. The small, sharply defined features and bright eyes, looking out from a thicket of gray hair and short, thick beard, gave an ingenuous, bird-like look to the sun-tanned face. Over his right shoulder several long mats were slung, like the one the slave had brought for Malchus to see, and strung on a rope which crossed the same shoulder and was grasped in his right hand he carried on his back a great bunch of palm-leaf baskets which rose above the height of his shoulders on each side of his face. In his left hand he held a staff.

After Malchus had beckoned to him twice the old man moved and began slowly to approach.

"Come, my friend," said Malchus. "I should like to buy some of your mats and baskets. Throw them down here and sit down yourself. My slave will spread out each mat so that I can examine it."

The hermit flung down his load as if glad to be eased of it, and Malchus saw that he was dressed in a rough tunic of untanned goatskin. He wore it with the hair turned inward against his body; a fringe of hair showed along the rough edges about his throat and round each thigh. His arms and legs were bare and he was shod with sandals. He ignored the couch which Malchus had ordered to be brought for him and sat down on the sample mat, spreading his bent knees outward and crossing his ankles. Malchus noticed the sharp shinbones and the extraordinary thinness and brownness of the legs. On their hairy, sun-parched skin patches of dry scurf showed white through the black hairs like salt on a brick. He sat immovable, with hanging head and fixed gaze, and there came from him the pungent animal smell of stale sweat. Once the smell would have sickened Malchus, but now it had no repulsion for him, for it savored of a simple and primitive life free from the luxuries and refinements against which his whole soul was in revolt.

"Before we attend to business," he said, "you must have some food and wine."

The hermit slowly raised his head. "I should be glad of a handful of dates and a cup of water," he said in a small, clear, tranquil voice.

"Wine would be better," answered Malchus. "You are exhausted. A little wine will act as a tonic."

The old man shook his head. "To give a tonic to the body," he said, "is to offer a weapon to the Enemy."

A slave brought him what he had asked for and he sat silently munching the dates and sometimes taking a little bird-like sip from the cup. There was something strangely touching in the spectacle of him sitting there, quietly ministering to the bare need of his frail body. For Malchus, in his present state of mind, he was a being from another world—a world of liberation and new powers, mysterious, peaceful, and ecstatic. In his attitude and his still gaze there was the limitless serenity of the desert. Malchus longed to talk to him intimately and frankly, and after a moment's thought he sent away the slaves and, leaving his couch, sat down on the floor near the hermit.

"Listen to me, my father," he said. "I will buy all your mats and baskets so that you will not need to wander from house to house, because I want you to stay here and help me with your advice."

The old man's voice came clear and calm: "Why should you ask a foolish man for advice?"

"You are not foolish, my father."

"I am foolish according to the wisdom of this world."

"I am not seeking for the wisdom of this world. I know that you are wise in the wisdom that I desire."

"If you truly believed that I am wise, you would not want to ask me questions. You would follow my example."

"But there are many ways of living wisely—different ways for different men. Of late, my father, I have been in great trouble and bewilderment and I cannot see my way. I desire the perfect life but I do not know how to find it. Recently I have read some of the writings of Plotinus and Proclus and I have found much that is good and beautiful in them. When they write of becoming one with the Divine my soul is drawn to their philosophy, but I am afraid of a life of thought because I know that I shall not find peace in thought alone. I hoped that you might explain to me a better way."

"I can explain nothing. We who are true Christians have no need of reasoning, because we have the faith which is made perfect through the love of the Lord Jesus."

"Is reason, then, of no value?"

"I will ask you a question. Which comes first, reason or mind? Is reason the source of mind, or the mind of reason?"

"I should say that the mind was the source of reason, because reasoning is an activity of the mind."

The old man nodded his head. "Then is not a bright and illumined mind greater than reason? Faith is the divine reason and deeds are truer and sharper than words."

"Tell me this, at least, my father. If I become a Christian and a hermit shall I escape from the love of women and the desires of the flesh?"

"No. They will assail you more fiercely in the desert than ever they did in the city."

Malchus sat silent. He was accustomed to the impassioned arguments of the town and was surprised that this old man, who had devoted his whole life to his faith, should have no desire to convert others to it. On the contrary, the replies he had given to Malchus's questions seemed intended to repulse rather than to draw him toward the hermit life. And yet, in the small, calm voice there had been no repulsion. It was unclouded by violence or stress, more like the sound of running water, or the murmur of the wind about walls and roofs. And turning his eyes to the old man now, he saw that he had relapsed into his attitude of contemplation, his head bent slightly forward and his eyes gazing steadfastly before him; and as Malchus watched him he raised his right arm without stirring his body and, reaching over his left shoulder, drew over his head a linen cowl which Malchus had not noticed before. It hung to his breast, covering his face, and when he had dropped his hand to the ground again he remained immovable in that attitude, like an idol carved out of wood.

Malchus rose and sat silent on his couch, occupied with his troubles and vague desires and afraid to disturb the hermit. But after an hour of immobility the old man rose, threw back his head cloth, and began to walk toward the door. He had forgotten his mats and baskets, but Malchus followed him and, touching his arm, offered him a handful of money. He stopped and took the money with a nod of the head, and was on the point of moving again, when Malchus spoke:

"I beg of you to stay here for a day or two, my father."

The old man turned his quiet, luminous gaze upon Malchus. "I cannot, my son," he replied, "for as a fish dies when a man lifts it from the water, so, if we hermits remain long among men, our minds become troubled and perverted. I must return to the city not built with hands."

"Which way will you go?"

"By the Lake Mareotis."

A sudden impulse made Malchus kneel down. "Bless me, my father," he said.

The hermit lifted his right hand, and Malchus heard the small, clear voice above him: "The blessing of God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son be upon you."

Malchus rose to his feet. "Tell me your name, my father?" he asked.

"My name is Serapion," replied the hermit. He vanished quietly out of the court and Malchus read in his face and movement that he was setting out immediately on his long journey back to the desert....

After the hermit had gone, Malchus fell again into meditation. His mind was in that state of ferment in which transformations which normally take shape by slow degrees throughout months and even years, may occur in the upheaval and agony of a single day. His soul, disturbed and harassed by the gradual crumbling of his union with Helena, had revolted suddenly and violently when she had deliberately flaunted a new lover in his face, and he had turned with all the fierceness of his nature, not against her, but against the whole life and society of which he and she were a part. Then, snatching in despair for some support in the ruin which had engulfed him, he had seized upon the idea which had attracted him both in the philosophy of the Neo-Platonists and in the Christian faith—the idea of a life isolated and self-sufficing, relying neither on human relationship nor on material support, but deriving its strength from a power within or beyond itself to which it resigned itself completely. In that idea he had felt a vague comfort even though the passivity and emptiness which it seemed to imply had discouraged him. Upon this the chance arrival of the hermit Serapion had come as a sudden solution. In the old man's serene detachment, his primitive and elemental air, Malchus had felt something more than a discipline of the mind: these things spoke of a discipline of the body, a life of physical battle, strenuous, unrelenting, the necessary and satisfying counterpart to those battles of the soul. The brevity of his replies, the perfect assurance of his faith, had embodied for Malchus that security after which he was groping. The hermit's impatience of argument, his lack of any desire to win over others to his faith, had roused in him more zeal than the most impassioned pleading could have roused. Now as he sat with bowed head he felt an excitement stirring within him. He was like one who, having wandered long in the dark, sees a light moving far ahead and, careless now of the pitfalls about him, runs straight on, absorbed body and soul in the pursuit of that vision of salvation.

It was in this state that his mother found him when, an hour after the hermit's departure, she came to visit him. She advanced down the portico, straight and dignified with her grave smile, and at the sight of her a sudden longing rose in him to drop back into his boyhood and take refuge again in her protecting love. It was a momentary impulse, no more; for such a regression, even if it had been possible, would have carried him back also into a life which had now grown hateful to him. As he rose to greet her, she saw the feverish light in his eyes, and when he had led her into an inner room and they had sat down side by side, she laid a cool hand on his forehead.

"Your head is cool," she said. "I was afraid at first that you had a headache!" And, knowing that inquiries about his health always irritated him, she went on, without waiting for him to speak, to talk of various matters—of relatives and friends recently seen or heard of, and of how Malchus's father had just secured a famous artist to redecorate their dining hall.

"You must come and see the designs when they are ready," she said. "The house will be yours some day, so you, as well as your father and I, must approve of them."

Malchus felt himself suddenly recalled by that casual remark to the world from which in spirit he had already traveled so far, and when his mother went on to speak to him with gentle anxiety of his future, he saw almost with the vividness of actuality the life which she contemplated for him. It was not the life of luxurious unconventionality which he had led for the last few years. It was the life of aristocratic conservatism in which he had been brought up, and the thought of it repelled him as much as the gay life against which he was in revolt. But the sight of his mother's gentle and earnest face as she leaned toward him with a little look of inquiry disarmed all show of antagonism in him. He loved her, and whenever, as so often happened, their sympathies clashed, he strove always not to hurt her.

"We have a feast next Thursday," she said to him. "I know you dislike these solemn dinners of ours, but come if you have nothing better to do. It would please your father. Crassus and Pompilla are coming and are bringing Julia."

"So you are still plotting, mother!" said Malchus with a smile.

She smiled back at him. "Well," she replied, "we have not yet quite given up hope. You cannot deny, at least, that Julia is an excellent young woman and that it would be a very good match. But if you do not care about her, there are others. What your father and I are thinking about most is the children. We were still young when you were born, but your boyhood prolonged our youth. Since you left us the house has been too quiet; we feel our age and long for your children so that with them we can grow young again. Then, as you know, your father is ambitious for you. We are both proud of the fact that for generations the family has held high positions in the state and it has been a disappointment to your father that you have not followed the family tradition."

"I only wish," answered Malchus, "that I could satisfy you both in this, but politics and government have no attraction for me, mother. If I took up a government post I should be an irritable and disillusioned old man before I reached forty."

"A thing too horrible to be thought of! Let us say no more about it, my boy. It is useless, I fully admit, to do violence to oneself in such matters. But you can have no such prejudice against marriage. In that direction, at least, your father and I can reasonably indulge our hopes." She rose to depart. "And you will come to our solemn dinner?" Her lip curled humorously.

"If I am here, I will come," Malchus replied, and he accompanied her to the house door and helped her into her litter.

Chapter
Five

The effect of his mother's visit was to harden Malchus's resolution. The thought of her alone and his love for her would have made him hesitate; it was what she represented that steeled his heart. For the life from which he was flying and the conventional life of the Alexandrian aristocracy were facets of the same hated existence. A shudder of loathing shook him and he felt within him a smarting sourness like a physical nausea. It would be useless to abandon only his own mode of life, for, if he stayed in Alexandria, sooner or later, he knew, his parents would recapture him. He must break away altogether, not only from one society or the other, but from Alexandria, from civilization itself. And so he shut the thought of his mother from his mind, for if he were to contemplate for a moment the pain he was about to cause her, his resolution would give way. He rose and stretched himself, drawing in a deep breath which surprised him by turning into a sob. Then with a sudden determination he went to his bedroom, undressed, and put on an old leather hunting-suit and a short cloak, and taking a leather pouch and a water-bottle, a serviceable staff and a little money, he went out into the court, crossed it, and without a glance behind him stepped for the last time out of the porch of his home....

But now, as he sat on the deck of the ship with his face toward the desert, this crowd of past events had faded for Malchus to no more than a thin and vaguely colored mist. His mind could not grasp the actuality of what had happened; it was numbed into a dream half tragic, half ecstatic. His bones and muscles ached from sitting so long on the hard deck and he stood up and stretched himself. From where he stood he could see the hermit. He was still sitting with his head covered in exactly the same position in which Malchus had found him when he went on board. Was it possible, Malchus wondered with awe, that the old man had never once moved during all those hours? Having stretched his cramped limbs, he sat down again, covered his head with his cloak, and became once more a solitary island of consciousness in the flux of time and tide. Even when the rowers stopped rowing and shipped their oars he did not stir, nor until the dry creaking of strained ropes told him that the ship was being hauled up to the landing place. Then with his cloak over his head he stood up to watch Serapion. The old man still sat immovable, but as Malchus watched him, without any show of surprise or of awakening consciousness, he calmly and deliberately stood up, moved slowly along the cumbered deck, and stepped on to the stone pier. Never once did he pause or look behind him, but with the same even pace he crossed the wharf and made for an opening in the row of white houses which bordered the lake. Malchus followed him. There was no danger in following him close, for, as Malchus knew, he would not look behind him.

The place where they had landed was no more than a straggling village, only a narrow belt of fields and vineyards dividing it from the desert, and soon their feet were plunging in the hot, loose sand and the long desert journey had begun.

For a mile the ground rose, making the labor of their going more arduous still, for at every step the sand filtered away downhill beneath their feet. At first Malchus fretted himself into a fever, but looking ahead at Serapion, he saw that he was plodding patiently on, content, it seemed, that each step should gain a little on the last; and, striving to imitate him, Malchus found that the exhaustion which had begun to assail him was more a matter of the mind than of the body, and that by shutting down his attention to the ground immediately in front of him and his energy to the achievement of the next step, he was able to preserve both body and mind from despair.

When next he looked ahead he was almost at the top of the slope and Serapion had disappeared. On the summit Malchus paused. He was standing on a great sandy swell, like an ocean roller dried into immobility. Halfway down the slope before him the figure of the hermit, shrunk to the height of a finger, made its infinitesimal progress across the undulating immensity of bleached gold-dust. The stark heat of the sun struck down as with a tangible weight and the sultry sand blazed it back, drier and more oppressive, from below. As far as the eye could strain there was nothing but sand—sand smoothed into vast plains, tossed up into hummocks, heaved into far-running swells, or exalted terrace above terrace in long broken ramparts. For a moment Malchus's heart failed him at a sight of such inhuman desolation. Then, without looking back, he began the descent, following the blurred footprints which ran diminishing in a long curve from where he stood to the elfin shape toiling with hardly perceptible movement far ahead. The sifting sand which had made the ascent so laborious made the descent easy, and by the time Malchus had dropped halfway down into the great trough of the desert he had gained ground on the hermit whose pace, uphill and downhill, never varied. Below him, away to the east, three ants crawled along the bottom of the trough. Minute by minute they grew larger. They were camels following the desert track which now began to show as a wide, traffic-ploughed furrow in the hollow beneath him. Serapion was crossing it now, and just before Malchus reached it the three camels passed in front of him and curved away northeastward, their foolish vulture necks straining out before them, the hooded riders lurching heavily to their awkward gait. Soon they had vanished into the emptiness, leaving only their broad spoor to prove that they were not specters of the wilderness.

The two travelers toiled on through the blazing afternoon. Serapion never slackened his pace, and Malchus, his head dizzy with the heat and glare and his legs aching from the unaccustomed labor, began to fear that his strength would fail him. It became more and more difficult to hold out against the despair provoked by the treacherous and shifty dust in which his feet sought vainly for solid resistance.

After he had again lost sight of the hermit, Malchus reached the summit of a still higher crest and came upon him not more than ten yards ahead of him. He was standing motionless, his arms extended sideways at right angles to his body, in the form of a cross. Before them lay a new realm of the desert. From east to west the sands rolled to the horizon in endless undulations, but in front of them high terraced ramparts cloven by ravines buttressed a vast tableland lifted high above that part of the desert in which they stood. Malchus sank to the ground and a delicious relief flowed like nectar through his aching body and limbs. He lay full length in the burning sand, his eyes still fixed on Serapion. The old man, like a traveler who sees far off his long-desired home, stood rapt in ecstasy. So long did he stand that it seemed to Malchus's tired mind that the shape before him was not a living thing, but a tree whose gaunt and broken branches had been withered by a century of suns. Malchus drew his cloak over his face and closed his eyes. When he opened them again Serapion had sunk upon his knees, his head bowed to the ground. Malchus waited patiently till he should rise again, for he was determined that, when he did so, he would reveal himself to him. The hermit remained long in that attitude, but Malchus could neither meditate nor pray. His mind and body were shaken with agitation and he could do nothing but lie watching Serapion, waiting anxiously for the thing on which he had set all his hopes to accomplish itself.

At last the old man rose, and Malchus, leaping up and stumbling through the deep sand, ran and seized his left hand in both his own. The old man seemed to be neither startled nor surprised, but he fixed his eyes intently on Malchus and, thrusting his staff upright in the sand, he made the sign of the cross with his free hand.

"Do not be angry with me, my father," cried Malchus, falling on his knees and still grasping the hermit's hand in his. "Yesterday I abandoned my friends and possessions in Alexandria and followed you. I overtook you at the wharf; I was with you on the ship; and I have followed you all this afternoon through the sand. Help me, my father, for you only can help me. I give myself into your hands; I am your slave."

In sign of his subjection Malchus threw himself on his face at the hermit's feet.

The old man looked down at the prostrate body. "My son," he said, "I believe that the God I serve will help you if you are in need of help, and that if your designs are evil he will discover your craftiness." He spoke thus because he was uncertain whether Malchus was not an evil spirit sent to tempt him. He recognized him as the rich Alexandrian to whom he had sold the work of his hands on the previous day, but this did not reassure him, for he knew well that Satan, who loves to lead astray the chosen of God, has the power to assume deceiving shapes. But when Malchus neither cried out nor changed his shape at the sign of the Cross, Serapion knew that he was innocent, for no evil spirit is strong enough to resist the holy sign.

Serapion, therefore, spoke to Malchus, ordering him to stand up. "For it is not right," he said, "that you should fall down before one who is a man like yourself."

Malchus rose to his feet. "What is it that you seek?" the hermit asked him.

"I seek to become a hermit," replied Malchus.

Serapion fixed upon him a gaze that was almost fierce.

"You do not know," he said, "what you seek. It is not possible for you, a man accustomed to ease and luxury, to become a hermit. Go back while the light lasts and you can still follow our tracks. You will reach the lake by sunset if you start now."

Malchus met the old man's gaze. "I shall never go back, my father," he said. "However hard the hermit's life, I know that I shall be able to endure it. Test me. Whatever you appoint for me to do, I will do."

"Have I not told you that you do not know what you are undertaking? If you wish to leave the world and live a holy life, go to one of the desert monasteries. There the life is austere but easy. If, after three or four years there, you feel a desire for great austerities, it will then be time enough for you to think of becoming a hermit."

"But I do not seek for an easy life nor a life in company with other men. I desire solitude and the greatest austerities that a man can undergo and live."

"My son, you do not understand what solitude in the desert means. When a man is left face to face with himself he comes near to madness, and until he has conquered the hunger of the belly and the desire of women he is endlessly tormented by dreams and visions. Even when his desires are subdued, the evil spirits take on a bodily form, seeking to delude him by day and torturing him by night, coming about his cell and sometimes even entering in and wrestling with him body to body: and they fill the night with their cries, more terrible than the cries of the jackals and hyenas."

Malchus waited till the old man had finished and then laid his hand upon his arm. "Do not deny me, my father," he said, "for my purpose is firm."

"I deny you for your good, my son," answered Serapion, "and now trouble me no more, for I have spoken too much and I must delay no longer in returning to the place where I should be."

As the old man turned away Malchus fell on his knees and stretched out his arms toward him.

At that the hermit turned on him, his eyes keen with anger. "Back!" he shouted, and snatching his staff out of the sand, he pointed with it toward the north. Then impetuously turning away, he began once more with his tireless mechanical tread to draw the slender trail of his footsteps onward still further into the untrodden waste.

Malchus lay for a while where the hermit had left him. He was broken in body and chilled to the heart. For the first time the sense of his utter loneliness came upon him. Serapion's cruel discouragement of his aspirations had exhausted him more than all the labors of the day. Then, easing his heart of a deep sigh, he wearily rose to his feet and began once again to toil in the track of the hermit.

For what seemed to be many hours they tramped across the great level waste stretching to the foot of the long escarpment which rose higher and higher as they imperceptibly approached it. Malchus, dazed by the monotonous labor of walking and the huge monotony which surrounded him on all sides, came to feel that neither he nor the small digit far ahead, to which he was mysteriously tied by the long narrowing trail of footsteps, stretched across the virgin sand, was making any progress, but rather that they were both condemned to toil endlessly, fruitlessly, and meaninglessly, each eternally alone in a landscape that never changed. Again he shut the outer world from his attention and with bent head and abstracted mind followed the trail step by step, never looking more than one pace ahead. And when again he raised his eyes it was to discover with a thrill of awe the golden wall of the escarpment towering gigantic before him. Here and there its endless length was broken by huge violet fissures. One of them opened immediately in front of him—a narrow ravine filled with blue shadow. The track that he followed pointed straight into its mouth and Serapion had disappeared within.

To enter the cool dimness of the ravine after the pandemonium of sunshine outside was a relief so delicious that Malchus dropped to the ground and, closing his eyes, lay for a while immovable. But the fear of losing Serapion soon roused him, and with aching limbs he continued on his way. The ground rose rapidly and the passage was for a long distance so narrow that two laden camels could not have passed down it abreast. The sandy floor and the precipitous rocks that walled it were of the same color as the desert, but here that color, shaded from the harsh glare of the sun, was mild and soothing to the eyes. Only, far overhead where the walls of the ravine inclosed a narrow channel of blue sky, their jagged summits blazed like a coping of solid fire.

After a long ascent the ravine bent sharply eastward, and, having turned the bend, Malchus came suddenly into an enchanted spot. For here the passage widened out into a great hall and there fell upon the sight a delicious greenness, and on the ears, blurred and enriched by innumerable echoes, the babble of flowing water. Malchus stood and drank in the scene. Not far from where he stood lay a dark pool in whose center a spring sent up a cone of silver water which rose and fell incessantly with a soft musical din so inviting that he could scarcely restrain himself from running forward and throwing himself into the pool. Flowering reeds and long green ferns waded in its shallow margins, and from the rock walls festoons of feathery green starred with white and yellow flowers, hung down till they trailed upon the grass which covered the floor. The air was soft and fragrant with green leaves and the scent of flowers, and it seemed to Malchus that he had suddenly stepped into Paradise. At the upper end of the hollow Serapion lay stretched at full length under a canopy of hanging green. Malchus could see from where he stood the regular rise and fall of his breast. He was asleep; and, lying in that lovely scene with his goatskin suit, his tangled hair, and his staff laid on the grass beside him, he appeared to be no longer the stern ascetic of the desert, but rather the kindly Pan of some Greek idyll. Malchus, having drunk of the pool and bathed his hands and face, lay down. His whole body, every limb and every muscle, tingled with relief. A profound sleepiness descended upon him. The leaves and rocks about him grew blurred and his eyes closed; to open them again required an effort almost beyond his strength. Yet he dared not sleep for fear Serapion should depart before he awoke. How blissful to fall asleep and sleep on till this consuming weariness was slaked. It was only by recalling that terrible sense of his utter loneliness which had assailed him when Serapion had cast him off, that he held himself to his resolve to persevere.

After what seemed no more than a few minutes he sat up suddenly in a terror. He must have slept, and for a long while, for the hollow was dim with twilight. The pool was a bubbling vat of liquid ruby and overhead the summits flared upward into a sky of crimson fire. The delicious babble of water still flowed on as if to soothe away all fear and all change. But Malchus sprang to his feet. It was too dark to see if Serapion was still where he had last seen him, and he hurried stealthily, his heart fluttering with dread, round the border of the pool. Then he halted suddenly and struck his hand to his mouth to stifle a cry of relief, for Serapion had only moved out into the open and was seated with his back to him in his familiar attitude. Malchus was sure that in a few minutes he would rise and continue his march, and at the thought that he, too, must rise and leave that beautiful spot came the other more overwhelming thought that this was the last time in his life that he would look upon flowers and green things and running water. He stretched out his hand, gathered a broad leaf, and laid his cheek against it, feeling its cool glossy texture and breathing in its green fragrance. Then, moving back to where he had slept, he loosed his sandals, flung off his cloak and suit, and stood naked beside the pool. His flesh shone pearly and dull in the twilight and the curves of his breast, belly, and thighs caught a faint rosy lacquer from the gleaming water. From where he stood he could see the motionless figure of the hermit. Then he stooped down, setting the palms of his hands on the ground, and, extending first one leg and then the other, slid into the pool. Divine coolness inclosed him. What bliss to throw up his arms and sink forever through cool fathoms of peace and oblivion! But the time was short and after a brief immersion he crept on to the bank and, opening his wallet, broke off a piece of his loaf and allayed his hunger. Then he dressed quickly, for it was now so dark that he could not see whether Serapion was still there or not, and taking up his stick, he went forward.

Serapion was gone, but Malchus could hear him not very far ahead, stirring the loose stones whose dry echoes startled the hollow. For, once the ravine left the spring, it became barren again and loose stones falling from the cliffs cumbered the way. The gloom made progress more difficult, but when at last Malchus emerged on to the upper desert a huge moon hung its mottled shield low over the east, calling a suppressed glimmer from the sand, and from every stone and every hump and hollow in the sand a long transparent shadow. Already its light was strong enough to enable Malchus to see distinctly the slow shape of Serapion moving in front of him, and soon it was sailing remote and brilliant in the deeps of the sky, and the desert beneath it shone marvelously white as if shrouded in newly fallen snow. And as if by the influence of the moon, so absolute a silence had fallen upon the desert that at the sense of it the heart stood still and Malchus took refuge from it by fixing his attention on the swing of his legs and body as he followed the ghost-like shape of the hermit, less real now than the shadow that jutted blackly from its feet and was drawn onward horizontally across the sand like a wide black sleigh.

Suddenly the tense silence broke in a hideous shriek, and in a moment a chorus of shrieks followed the first, remote, inhuman, like the shrieking of tortured souls. Malchus halted, chilled with terror, and looking anxiously ahead at Serapion he saw that he too had stopped. His right arm moved; he was making the sign of the Cross; and Malchus remembered what the hermit had told him of the evil spirits that haunted the desert, taking the form now of human beings, now of hyenas and jackals. Following the hermit's example, he too made the sign of the Cross and whispered a prayer as he moved again on his way.

So through the long night they tramped onward, and as, amid the weariness of the body and the fears of the mind, his thoughts turned for shelter to the beautiful green hollow in the ravine, and he realized, with a tremulous ecstasy mixed with tragic regret, that he had cast love and beauty, quiet happiness and the warm joys of the body, behind him forever. Ahead of him lay only solitude, desolation, and strange fears, a life of fierce discipline for soul and body, a terrible and wonderful life whose grimness held for his restless and fanatic soul the keen, indestructible beauty of a diamond.

Chapter
Six

Upon a high, desolate terrace looking eastward across descending waves of desert to where the Nile gleamed like the track of a snail under the long ramparts of the further shore, Serapion's cell stood half sunk in the loose sand. A mound of sand, driven up by the prevailing wind, buried its northern wall to within a few feet of the roof. The southern and western walls were less deeply buried, and on the eastern side a little trench which the hermit kept clear of the encroaching sand led up to the door. There was no sign of other habitation; the little hut stood alone, a solitary watch tower beneath which the illimitable desert extended north, east, and south, its pure unbroken desolation changing hour by hour from the blandest to the most sinister beauty, but always unreal, unearthly as some waste of the unpeopled moon.

The sun was dropping toward the west; soon it would dip below the sandy ridge that rose behind the cell, and Malchus sat in the sand, leaning his back against the south wall, and watched the slanting shadow which would soon inclose him. It was the moment when the long-hoped-for respite from the torrid heat of the day descends like balm upon the desert. Malchus sighed and leaned back his head against the warm stone wall. He felt as weak as if he were at the end of a severe illness, and when he drew in his breath his head, filled with a strange dizziness, seemed to grow light and unsubstantial. The desert journey had been long and exhausting. With little interval for rest the hermit and his undesired disciple had toiled on through hours of torrid daylight and moonlit darkness, and it was night again when they reached their journey's end.

Following Serapion cautiously, Malchus had watched him in the snowy moonlight as he entered his cell, and had then crept round to the back of it and lain down in the sand. He had no plan for the future. It was sufficient for him that he had arrived at his journey's end. Now Serapion could hardly refuse to help him. To prove to him that he was capable of severe asceticism, Malchus had determined to eat no more of his loaf. It lay in the wallet at his side, an endless temptation. His only indulgence was to take a little sip of water from his leather bottle twice a day. When first he had arrived he had sunk, from sheer exhaustion, into a heavy sleep which had lasted till long after dawn. But the following night, soon after he had fallen asleep, a wild howl close beside him had roused him in terror and he had seen a dog-like shape with drooping hind quarters slinking away through the moonlight. Those drooping hind quarters thrilled him with horror; they suggested something foul and unnatural, half vermin and half devil, and the thought that some such prowling creature might fall upon him while he slept had thrown him into a condition of alternate sleep and startled waking which was more exhausting than sleeplessness. Sometimes those shriller shrieks which had terrified him as he crossed the desert by night had broken out not far from where he lay, and he had seen black dog-like shapes moving along the sky line of the rising ground behind the cell.

Two days passed and Malchus neither saw nor heard the smallest sign of Serapion; yet each morning, shortly after dawn, he was aware, as if by some new sense, that the hermit issued from his cell and after a few moments went in again, and on the third day, as dawn was breaking, he saw him standing, a pale wraith on the pale sand, looking at him. He stood for so long that it seemed impossible to Malchus that, if he had been human, he would not have moved. Then, without word or sign, he turned and the wall of his cell hid him from view. Another day passed and that sole appearance of Serapion took on in Malchus's memory the nature of a vision. Worldly realities began to fade into something less apprehensible but more intense; his life passed like a strange, slow dream whose mood fluctuated with the oppression of the daytime, the sweet, too brief respite of evening, the dread of night, and the blessed consolation of returning dawn. At dawn and again at noon and nightfall he tried to meditate and pray, but when he did so a strange, serene apathy came upon him, like the apathy of the dying, and it seemed as if his heart and brain had dissolved into a mist. And by degrees his thoughts dwindled to nothing but thoughts of food and drink.

At night he dreamed of meat and wines. He sat again in his old home or in the house of a friend and watched the slaves enter, carrying dishes of delicious viands to which the desire of his soul reached out in delighted anticipation. Then the great crystal flagons would be set upon the tables; but always as the guests began to take their places he awoke to his gnawing hunger and remembered once more that he would never again eat dainty food; and, racked by the craving of his belly, he felt that he could have sold his immortal soul for food. Even in his waking moments, visions of food and drink began to tantalize him and often he would find that he had fallen into a long revery in which he was devising elaborate meals and lingering lovingly over the details. Then, with an effort of the will, he would banish these vain imaginings from his mind and try to fix his thoughts upon God and the soul.

At other times he lost the sense of hunger and fell into a mood of tremulous exaltation in which his senses seemed to have been refined of all that is earthly and physical. In that mood he ceased to be aware of the past or the future and existed in a present of subtle and fragile ecstasy too keen to be called pleasure and too exalted for pain. This state would hold him for hours and then it would crumble as if consumed by its own intensity, and in its place would come a black and mundane despair, or again that tyrannous craving for food which excluded all else. On the fourth day of his fast he had yielded so far to his craving as to open his wallet and take out the fragment of bread. The torrid heat of the desert had dried it to the hardness of a brick, but to Malchus, as he crouched on his knees, holding it in his hands as if it were some holy relic, it seemed a thing more precious than pure gold. He ran his hands lovingly over it, feeling a delight in the associations which it evoked. Then he bowed his head to it and smelled it, and instantly, as he ravenously drew in the savor of it, his bodily nature became one vibrating chord of desire. He felt the spittle collect in his mouth, and in another moment he would have been gnawing wolfishly at the crust if he had not, by a supreme effort of will, flung it far from him on to the sand and, with a cry like the cry of a wounded animal, covered his eyes with his hands. The smell of the bread still lingering on his hands prolonged his struggle, but soon he had gained a firmer control of himself and, bowed down as he was, he fell into a long, passionate prayer.

When he opened his eyes again he saw before him on the sand a shadow like the shadow of a tree trunk. He raised his head. Serapion stood there gazing at him. Malchus felt the heart leap in his breast, but he neither moved nor spoke. He remembered the fierceness with which Serapion had rejected him in the desert and he expected that now he would be still more angry. But the old man was contemplating him calmly and with a look in which there was no trace of anger, and presently Malchus heard the quiet voice which had stirred him so deeply when they had talked in Alexandria.

"What do you seek?"

"I seek to become a hermit," Malchus replied.

"While I watched you just now," said Serapion, "the evil spirits were hovering about your head in the likeness of flies. If I had not rebuked them they would have settled on you."

"I am ready to war with evil spirits," Malchus answered, "and with God's help I shall overcome them."

"I have told you," said the hermit, "that, being a man long accustomed to ease and luxury, it is impossible for you to become a hermit. If you wish to fly from your former life, return at least to the village on Lake Mareotis where we entered the desert, and work for your living there in the fields."

But still Malchus persisted. "Tell me what I ought to do to become a hermit, and I will do it."

"I have told you," answered the old man, quietly, "that it is not possible for you to become a hermit, but if you wish to lead the holy life, go to a desert monastery; there they will receive you. Here I live alone and often I eat only once in five days, and even then I do not eat a full meal."

He said this to dissuade Malchus from his impossible ambition. But Malchus replied: "For the last four days, my father, I have eaten nothing. There on the sand are the remains of the loaf which I last tasted before the end of our journey."

The old man, gazing at Malchus, knew that what he said was true. "Rise up," he said, "and get the bread which you threw away, and come into the cell."

Malchus obeyed. The doorway of the cell opened into a little room whose floor was the bare sand, and its walls the same rough stones as the exterior. A table stood near the door, on it a mug and two earthenware dishes, and a bench beside it; on the floor lay a sheepskin and a great heap of dried palm leaves, and from pegs in the wall hung a full sack and a goatskin containing water. A doorless opening led to a small inner chamber having an altar and a wooden crucifix, and, at the height of a man standing, a little window guarded by two wooden bars.

Malchus stood in the doorway with his fragment of loaf in his hand, waiting to be invited to enter; but Serapion took no notice of him. He was lifting down the water skin from its peg and, untying the neck, he poured some water into a dish. Then, going to the sack, he took out a little loaf and, dipping it in the water, began to eat. Malchus expected that he would invite him to eat, too, but Serapion had, it seemed, forgotten him, and Malchus, unable to endure the sight of another man eating, turned away his eyes and leaned his weary body against the door-post.

When Serapion and finished eating he stood up and began to chant the psalm called "De Profundis." Malchus stood upright and, as Serapion proceeded to chant the same psalm many times over, he joined in the chanting. When Serapion had chanted the psalm twelve times he fell on his knees and began to pray aloud, saying prayers up to the number of twelve. He did all these things in order to test the patience and forbearance of Malchus. But Malchus joined gladly in the psalms and prayers, for he felt that he was now receiving direction and help in what he should do.

When they had finished it was already late in the evening and, as Serapion seemed again to have forgotten him, Malchus resolved to return to his place outside. It seemed to him now a terrible thing to be going back to that state of spiritual torpor which came upon him in his loneliness whenever he had conquered the fierce obsession of bodily hunger; and so he turned, before leaving his cell, to Serapion.

"Will you not give me some rule, my father," he asked, "for meditation and prayer, for it is hard, without experience, to know how best to turn the soul to God."

Serapion was silent. He was considering the case of this young man so stubbornly determined to take upon himself the hard life of the hermit. He considered how he had fasted for four days and then, when bitterly disappointed in his hope of food, had been glad to join in the long psalm-singing and prayers, and how he had lain in the open unprotected for four nights and was ready now to go back uncomplaining to his place. And seeing so much good will waiting only for guidance to express itself in good works, the hermit was touched and, stretching out his hand in the dark, he took Malchus by the cloak and drew him back into the cell and toward the doorway of the small inner chamber. "Go in," he said, "and twelve times throughout the night you shall recite the psalm which we recited this evening. This you must do standing, but between every repetition kneel down and meditate upon the words until they become the very words of your soul crying to God."

Malchus groped his way into the little oratory and stood before the altar. To spend the night within four walls, undisturbed by the fear of prowling beasts, was for him the most blessed ease. Though his body was feeble from fasting and his brain dizzy from lack of sleep, his soul was warm with happiness at the prospect of passing the night as Serapion had instructed him, for it seemed now that he had been rescued from his own doubt and ignorance and that Serapion was beginning to relent toward him. He was glad that he had been set to perform not only a discipline of the soul, but also a discipline of the body. Once during the night, as he knelt in meditation, it seemed to him that his soul floated away from his body, and he saw his body bowed down before the altar and, standing upon the altar above him, the figure of a man with wings. Great wings they were, curving high above his shoulders and reaching downward to his heels, and every feather of them was plumed with rays of light. The figure grew clearer, brighter, it seemed to pulsate with the intensity of its brightness. Then Malchus's soul began to return to his body, his body roused itself with a little shudder, and he sat up on his heels and stared at the dark altar with a dazed mind. But the memory of the vision filled him with encouragement and he raised his aching body and stood again to recite the psalm.

When the daylight returned an unearthly peace had settled upon him. The voice of Serapion called him from the outer chamber, and Malchus found him standing at his table before a heap of dried palm leaves.

"My father," he said to the old man, "I feel that my soul is at rest."

The hermit looked up from a palm leaf which he was tearing into strips. "For a little while," he replied, "that is well."

"And it is not always well for the soul to be at rest?"

"No, my son, for it is by war and strife, and not by rest, that the soul advances in spiritual excellence."

"Is it then wrong to pray to be delivered from strife?"

"When strife comes upon us we must pray, not that the strife may be removed, but that we may have patience to overcome the strife."

"And what if I find myself for a long time at peace?"

"Then you must pray to God to let the strife return to you."

"But if strife is good, why do they that seek God fly from the towns and villages where, as I well know, there is endless strife for the soul?"

"Because worldly strife blinds and oppresses the soul; but here in the desert a man finds only the strife of the heart which is the path of spiritual excellence. Here the spirit is free from those other kinds of strife—the strife which arises from the ears, the eyes, and the mouth. But now," he said, "you must watch me so as to learn how to make mats and ropes of palm leaves. These dried palm leaves must be split up into ribbons, and when we have a good supply of ribbons we must lay them in the trough to soak."

As he spoke he was splitting up the leaves into long, narrow strips, tearing the leaf always along the grain, and when Malchus saw how the splitting was done he took a leaf and began to tear it in the same way.

"This," the old man went on, "is the easiest part of the work. It needs no more than a little care and neatness. But when we have finished the splitting I can show you at once how to plait, for I set some other strips to soak last night, that we should not be delayed by having to wait for these to soak, for the soaking is a matter of some hours."

The hermit ceased to talk and he and Malchus continued to work on the heap of leaves till Malchus's fingers, unhardened as yet by manual work, were covered with painful cuts from the sharp-edged leaves. When the whole heap was finished, the hermit stooped and, turning back the sheepskin which lay on the floor, disclosed a stone trough from which he lifted a dripping sheaf of ribbons which had been soaking all night. These he laid on the table and, having done so, threw into the trough those which they had just split. "Now," he said, "you must watch carefully;" and choosing the most suitable strips, he began slowly but with the deftness and precision of an expert to plait the first rows of a narrow mat. Having done so, he took the work to pieces and repeated the operation three times. And when he had plaited it again a fourth time he handed the piece to Malchus. "Now," he said, "take it, and take these soaked strips, too, and sit down outside in the shadow of the cell and continue from the point at which I stopped. Take also the sheepskin there, so that you can lay the strips on it and keep them out of the sand. When you have woven to the length of your arm, let me see what you have done."

Malchus obeyed, and for three hours he sat laboring patiently at the work, while the free ends of the strips escaped repeatedly from his inexperienced fingers and worked themselves loose, and the chafing of the strips hurt the cuts in his fingers, which were becoming more and more painful. When at last he had woven an arm's length he took it in for Serapion to inspect. The old man examined it critically, and then without a word unplaited all that Malchus had done. "The weaving is very loose," he said. "See that it is closer next time."

Malchus humbly took up the unraveled strips and went out to begin again. It was now the height of noon. Sky, sand, and surrounding air radiated a sultry glow, and Malchus, becoming every hour more feeble, felt as if he were imprisoned in an oven. So far from gaining any facility in weaving, it seemed to him that he was becoming more and more clumsy and, to add to his difficulties, the strips, creased and twisted by the first weaving, would not conform to a new texture. His fingers were bleeding now; the blood was staining the strips; and when after two hours he had finished, he found that his weaving was as loose as before. When he went in despair to show this new attempt to Serapion, the old man looked up impatiently and remarked, after a scornful glance at the work, that it was no better than before. "Take it to pieces and begin again," he ordered, and Malchus, concealing his bitter discouragement, went out and did so, trying again to improve the work. But by this time the strips were so creased and strained that even the greatest adept could have made nothing of them, and when Malchus, after a long, disheartening struggle, had finished, he saw that the weaving was now looser than ever. Tears of vexation stood in his eyes. He had been at work for over six hours and he was exhausted in body and mind. The pain from his fingers aggravated the pain in his heart and he felt that if Serapion set him to do the work for a fourth time he would be unable to prevent himself from breaking into sobs. But when Serapion had again examined the work, he laid it aside without remark and, turning to Malchus, asked him, "Will you eat, my son?"

The sudden release from the long strain almost snapped the feeble cord of Malchus's self-control. Tears ran down his cheeks, but with a last effort he mastered himself. "You know best, my father," he answered, "what is right for me to do."

The hermit, without further speech, set a dish of water on the table and, bringing a shell full of salt and four small loaves from the sack, he signed to Malchus to sit down with him at the table. Then he gave Malchus one of the loaves, and himself took Malchus's dry and sandy fragment, and they began to eat together, dipping their loaves in the water to soften them.

The hard, stale stuff seemed to Malchus more delicious than the rarest of the delicacies he had tasted at the feasts of Alexandria. The savor of it on his tongue and in his nostrils filled all his physical being with delight; but he forced himself to eat slowly, trembling lest his gluttony should become apparent to Serapion and should discredit him in his eyes.

When they had finished, Serapion spoke again. "My son," he said, "will you eat another loaf?"

"If you will eat another, my father, I will do so," answered Malchus; "but if you will not, neither will I."

"I have had enough," Serapion replied, "for I am a hermit and I have eaten already to-day."

"Then, I, too, have had enough," said Malchus, "for I seek to become a hermit."

Serapion dropped the other two loaves into the sack again, for he knew that after so long a fast it would be better for Malchus to eat no more; and seeing that his strength was almost spent for lack of repose, he bade him lie down in the cell and sleep, "for fasting and watching," he said, "are in themselves worth nothing, but only in so far as they minister to the soul."

Chapter
Seven

Malchus had been with Serapion for forty days and during all that time he had followed with gladness the orderly rule of life which the hermit prescribed. His thoughts and desires, surfeited of the refined sensuality of his former life, turned easily to this new life in which every privation and every act of discipline was for him a revolt against the hated past. It seemed as if his mind had been purged of desire, for during all that time he was untroubled by the lusts of the flesh; and as Serapion permitted him every evening to eat a small meal of bread and salt or of dried dates, the dreams and reveries concerning food and wine had ceased to molest him. He had soon mastered the art of plaiting palm leaves and could now make ropes, mats, and baskets which would be good enough to sell; and when the hours of prayer and meditation were over he fell to work on a mat or basket, rejoicing to see his own handiwork grow under his fingers. Only twice during these forty days had any human soul penetrated into the empty desert which inclosed them. Once when Malchus was chanting a psalm in the oratory he was surprised by the sound of a strange voice calling out a greeting which was answered by the voice of Serapion. At the sound of it Malchus forgot his chanting and, driven by curiosity, began to listen avidly to the conversation which followed the greeting. But Serapion called to him, bidding him continue his devotions, and putting a great constraint upon himself, he forced himself to continue until he had finished the appointed service. By that time there was silence in the cell, and when he came into the outer room he found Serapion alone. The old man did not speak, and Malchus, knowing that this silence was intended as a rebuke to his curiosity, took up a half-woven basket and went out. Far below him, swaying faintly above its black shadow on the immaculate sweep of the desert, a figure no larger than a weevil toiled southward toward the remoter deserts of Thebaid; and who he was and why he had come to the cell Malchus never knew.

The second visitor had come a few days later, leading an ass laden with baskets and sacks. An hour before he arrived, Malchus, who sat weaving a basket outside the cell, had seen a small dark blot moving upon the stainless face of the desert. He had watched it until it split into two blots, one larger than the other, and then tiny moving images of man and beast had grown slowly to creatures of natural size. When they had reached the foot of the slope below the cell, the driver had left his beast and climbed the sliding bank alone. He carried a leather sack slung over his left shoulder. The ass stood patiently below, flapping each ear alternately; from where he sat, Malchus could see the swarm of flies swaying like smoke about its head. The man had reached the top of the slope. It was evident that he did not see Malchus, for he approached the cell cautiously, as if hoping to escape notice. But before he could reach the door Serapion came out, and after they had greeted each other he took from the stranger the sack he was carrying, and then held out his hand. The stranger made a gesture of refusal. "Do not repay me, brother," he said, "for by accepting them as a gift you will confer a blessing on me."

"Take the payment that is your due, brother," answered Serapion; "for has not the Lord Jesus commanded us to owe no man anything?"

The stranger took the money that Serapion offered. "It shall go, then, to some one who has need of it," he said. That was the end of their talk. Serapion carried the sack into the cell, and presently brought it back empty; the stranger took it and with a brief farewell departed, and it seemed to Malchus a marvelous thing that, living alone in that inhuman desolation, the hermit should not be tempted to delay his visitor in talk.

When he had finished weaving the basket, Malchus returned to the cell and found the hermit standing by the table, which was covered with many little loaves of bread and a jar of oil. "By God's mercy," he said, "Brother Apollonius has brought us enough food for thirty days, and so I shall be spared the journey to the monastery in Nitria, which is the nearest place where bread can be obtained. That brother was once a merchant in Alexandria, but, being desirous to lead the holy life, he left his business and departed to Nitria; and since he was unable either to learn any handicraft or to watch and fast to any great degree, he took upon himself to go at regular intervals to Alexandria and buy there the things required by the brethren; and besides this, he carries pomegranates and raisins and eggs and other needful things to them that are sick among the hermits that live round about Nitria. Nor is that all; for when that is done, he goes forth, as now, to visit the hermits who live many miles beyond, bringing to them the things without which a man cannot live. But for this he is unwilling to receive payment, doing it for God's sake, and often when I have been absent from this cell, or praying in the oratory, I have afterward found food set upon the window-sill or left at the door. So has Brother Apollonius found for himself a way in which he can serve God and benefit the faithful."

While he was speaking, Serapion had taken from the sack the loaves which still remained there. There were only three of them. "See!" he said to Malchus. "If Brother Apollonius had not come to-day, I should have had to set out for Nitria to-morrow." Then with Malchus's help he dropped all the new loaves into the sack till it hung from its peg full-bellied as the carcass of a hind which a hunter has slung by the feet from the wall of his cabin.

"But the water skin, too, is almost empty," said Malchus.

"To-morrow," replied Serapion, "I am going to refill it."

He spoke as if it were an easy matter, and Malchus supposed, therefore, that there must be some spring not far off. But Serapion told him that the nearest spring was five miles away; "and this spring," he said, "is dry for two months of the year, and when last I filled the skin from it, on the day before I started for Alexandria, I saw that it was beginning to run dry. It will be quite dry by this time and so I must go to the river."

"But the river is many miles away," said Malchus.

"It is fifteen miles from here," answered the old man, "and as there is no moon at present I shall have to start early so as to reach the river before nightfall. At the first hint of daylight I shall start back, and before sunset I shall be here."

"I will come and help you," said Malchus, "for the skin, when full, must be a heavy load."

But the hermit would not allow Malchus to accompany him, and next day, when Malchus had finished his prayers, he found that Serapion was gone and the skin was gone from the wall, and, running out-of-doors, he espied, far off, the small figure which had grown so familiar to him during the long journey from Alexandria. Already it was halfway across the plain which extended, smooth as a sea of milk, from the foot of the steep descent beneath him to the next great wave of the desert. For a long time Malchus stood watching it with a strange sinking at the heart. Then he turned to his plaiting, and when he looked again Serapion had vanished over the next crest.

For the first time Malchus was face to face with utter solitude, and at the sense of it a profound loneliness descended upon him. He discovered now that, even during the hours when he had been unable to see or hear Serapion, he had always, by some unknown sense, felt the comfort of his companionship. For little by little, without being aware of it, he had fastened upon the old man all those bonds of human affection which he had so ruthlessly severed when he fled from Alexandria. Serapion had become for him his father, his mother, and his dear friend, and, deprived of him, he was deprived of everything. Everything but himself, for now, as in a fever, he had become sharply aware of himself as a thing separate from all else. At the same time vivid memories of his former life began to assail him. One after another they flowed through his mind, each with its own keen emotion; and last of all the face of Helena flashed upon his inner eye with the heart-shaking clearness of reality. He cried out aloud and, not knowing what he did, sprang to his feet and ran into the cell, as though to take refuge from some specter or prowling beast. There he fell on his knees and hid his face in his hands. The discovery that he had not, after all, escaped from the past, that he bore it still stored up within him and ready to spring to life and torture him in his moments of weakness, filled him with bitter discouragement. Crouching there immovable, he prayed passionately for strength, and after a while strength came to him and he rose from his knees and returned to his weaving. He had by now become so expert that he could work blindfold, and he sat now with his head cloth drawn over his face to keep off the flies which through the hot hours incessantly plagued every living thing. But now the hot, veering note of their buzzing brought comfort to him, for it raised a screen of sound between him and the huge silence which inclosed him, and soon the busy monotony of manual labor lulled his heart into resignation, and at last even into contentment. He was completing the largest mat he had yet made, and when he had finished the last rows he secured the loose ends and, standing up, spread it out on the sand. The texture was beautifully close and even. Malchus heaved a sigh of accomplishment and surveyed it with pleasure. But as he did so there came into his mind the occasion on which he had first completed a mat of sound workmanship and had carried it proudly to Serapion. Serapion had examined it carefully, nodding his head many times over it, and had then, without comment, spent an hour in pulling it to pieces. The ruthless destruction of his handiwork had pained Malchus deeply, and for the first time his heart had risen in revolt against the hermit; but he had controlled his tongue and had gone out and lain for an hour sulking behind the cell. By that time his pride had submitted and he was at peace again. In the evening Serapion had recited many times over the verses which contain that command of the Lord Jesus, "Set not your affections upon things of the earth"; and when Malchus had learned it by heart Serapion had set him to meditate upon it, "and do not forget, my son," he had said, "that to cast off the world of men is nothing, for unless a man has also cast off the smallest earthly delight, his soul is still of this world." And next morning, as Malchus went out to work, Serapion had looked up and said to him, "You have now mastered the art of plaiting leaves."

That memory now rose to rebuke his pleasure in the mat which he had just finished, but this time he did not revolt against the rebuke; he only lamented his failure to progress in the attainment of perfection, and in order to purge from his heart the smallest taint of pride, he sat down and sternly set himself to pick the beautiful mat to pieces. It was a slow process, not only because the mat was large, but also because he was taking care not to strain the ribbons, for he was determined to weave them into baskets. And when at last he had quite undone the work of many days, he set to work at once on the first of the baskets and worked on until it was finished.

By that time the sun had set. Arched immeasurably above the earth, the sky, deep beyond deep, was one great flame of scarlet. Blood-red and luminous, the desert from horizon to horizon blazed it back until in that world of sultry, all-pervading glow the very air seemed red. It was a moment of mysterious intensity, the symbol, it seemed, of that august sacrifice in which the divine blood had been poured upon the world as an atonement for the sins of man. Malchus, caught into a holy exaltation, stood with uplifted arms; the huge gray crucifix of his shadow extended down the long slope from his feet. "Redeem me also, O blessed Lord," he prayed; "burn out my sins with the fire of thy blood."

The moment faded. The face of the desert grew ashen-gray and soon the earth-floored, heaven-roofed furnace had changed to a pallid and desolate cavern from whose emptiness the chilled heart recoiled. Malchus lowered his arms, and as he did so a sudden draught fluttered past him and within a few feet from where he stood a little whirlwind troubled the sand. It grew, and soon a grim and threatening wraith rose upward to a giant's height and towered above him. The whirling sand had gathered itself into a human body. Malchus, speaking aloud the name of Christ, made the Sign of the Cross, and the life went out of the wraith and it collapsed into dust before his eyes. But the sight of it had troubled him. It was as if it had arisen, hard upon the divine mystery of the sunset, as a sign of that other mystery in which are hidden the powers of darkness and evil. A cold spasm shook his body, and, gathering together his work, he retreated into the cell and by the last vestiges of twilight ate his single meal of bread and salt.

He ate slowly because he dreaded the long, empty hours of darkness which lay before him; for now, for the first time, he realized complete isolation. He stared at the darkness of the cell and it seemed to him that it was thick and spongy, a gloom grown palpable. But the silence was more terrible than the darkness; its infinity and its horrible imminence shriveled his soul; its intensity seemed every moment to be on the point of concentrating into some terrible climax. Later in the night, he knew, it would break in those shrieks and howls which were even more harrowing than silence itself, and he found himself dreading the moment when the first howl should come. Yet silence and darkness and all the fears of the night could do nothing, he well knew, against the perfect safety to be found in prayer, and his mind turned to the oratory. But he felt a strange reluctance to move. If he moved, he felt, he would loose all these waiting terrors that had gathered silently about the cell. He controlled himself sternly and, standing up, repeated aloud the psalm which begins, "Save me, O God; for the waters are come even unto my soul." The sound of his own voice reassured him and the silence moved farther away.

When he had repeated the psalm twice he groped toward the oratory and paused for a moment in the doorway. Though he heard and saw nothing, he knew that the oratory was not empty. He waited with beating heart, and suddenly a fluttering, intermittent draught smote his face with soft, impalpable blows. Fear clutched at his heart, a fear which leaped up into horror at a sudden pattering of hands against the bars of the little window. With his right hand Malchus made the holy sign upon the darkness and repeated again the same psalm. When he had finished it he paused again, and now he could feel that the cell was empty. Then with a braver heart he entered and began his nightly prayers and meditations, and as he prayed aloud a warm sense of security settled upon him. Only when he stopped praying and fell to meditating did the terrible silence return, pouring in upon him through the window, welling coldly through the doorway, bringing a sense of the draughty void that encompassed him, till his soul struggled as if in deep water, and again he took refuge in prayer. He prayed until his words stumbled into nonsense and his body swayed like a tree in the wind, and, feeling that he was going to fall, he leaned against the wall of the cell. The relief of even that little respite sent a wave of luxurious numbness through his body; his heavy eyelids dropped for a moment as if by their own weight. Then slowly the dark form of a human head took shape upon a background of cloudy gold. It cleared, brightened, took on color and life, and the face of Helena gazed at him with shining eyes and parted lips of kindling passion. His own lips moved and he muttered her name with slow, incredulous delight.

Instantly long, derisive shrieks broke in upon the silence, then other shrieks, and others still, filling the night with an infernal chorus which roused into ghastly life the boundless void about the cell. Malchus sprang shuddering from his dream. His body was cold with fear, for he was convinced now that these nightly shrieks were in very truth the voices of those powers of evil which tower up out of the sand or lurk expectant in the silence, waiting for the moment when one of the faithful, flagging in the endless contest, should yield to them an accession of power. He prayed loudly and fervently, and soon the shrieks grew fainter, dying in bayings and howlings miles away down the wilderness.

For the remainder of the night Malchus, beating his breast and wrestling with bodily exhaustion and flagging spirits, persevered in prayer, remembering what Serapion had told him of the power of prayer. For once, Serapion had said, when he and the Abba Macarius had stood by night in the open desert, they had seen a great column of light set upon a hilltop and reaching up into the sky, and the blessed Macarius had told him that it was the prayers of the monks in the great monastery of Nitria ascending to the everlasting throne. And at last, as if in answer to Malchus's prayers, a gray, watery light filled the cell and the little window became a gleaming square, pure and clear as the gleam on a silver shield. Malchus, cold and exhausted, felt his soul thrilled by the blessed redemption of daylight, and, dragging his stiffened body into the outer chamber, he opened the door and went out.

Below him the infinite gray desert lay dwarfed and shrunk beneath a vast sheaf of golden light springing far beyond the blue hills which bordered the Nile. It was as though the prayers of all faithful throughout the length and breadth of Egypt had been gathered together into the east. And somewhere, an invisible atom in the lower grayness, Malchus knew that Serapion must at that moment be toiling back to him under the heavy load of the water skin.

Chapter
Eight

With the return of day Malchus's mind grew calm again and he remembered the terrors and struggles of the night as a man remembers vaguely the fever that has left him. Throughout the day he followed scrupulously the appointed order of his life, but as the day declined the prospect of Serapion's return roused in him an expectancy so keen that he could with difficulty prevent himself from running down the hill and starting off across the plain to meet the old man. But this, he knew, would displease him, and he resolved that Serapion should find him faithfully observing his duties. He denied himself even the relief of glancing from time to time across the desert for a first sight of him; but he could not quell his inward excitement, and as he sat weaving with the head cloth drawn over his face his nerves were alert and tense for the moment of Serapion's return. Even if he neither saw nor heard him, he would know instinctively that he was near. But hour followed hour, and Malchus, having finished another basket, lifted his cowl and saw that the sun was setting. He gathered together his work and moved with a heavy heart toward the cell. When he reached the door he saw Serapion standing within; he had prepared the table for a meal. Malchus's heart leaped into his throat; his impulse was to fling away his work and throw himself at the old man's feet. He checked the impulse and waited, humble and expectant, for Serapion to turn and greet him, and when he neither turned nor spoke Malchus shrank back, chilled into himself. As he laid away his work the old man's quiet voice broke the silence, "Have you eaten, my son?" and when Malchus replied that he had not, Serapion brought another loaf from the sack and they ate in silence.

Next morning, an hour before the dawn, Malchus heard the voice of Serapion calling to him from outside. He rose from his knees and, going into the outer chamber, opened the door of the cell. It was as if he had opened a door on eternity. Before him lay the bare, dead world of a burned-out planet, an ancient world, crushed and exhausted by the weight of never-ending time. At these twilight intervals mankind with its loves and angers and unearthly ideals shrank to a thing of no more account than a heap of stones or a fume of sand endlessly agitated in the eddies of a pool. Even the face of the world itself lost its separate reality and became a part of the expression of some divine or infernal mood, a mystery never to be fathomed by the mind, but waking in the soul an untranslatable echo. Malchus stood for a moment thrilled and appalled before he moved out to the edge of the terrace where the figure of the hermit stood so lifeless and immovable that Malchus could hardly believe that the voice which had called him had issued from it. So intense was the silence that it seemed that, when at last it broke, the whole of creation would be shivered with it.

But when Serapion spoke his voice was no more than a mote in the silence. "My son," he said, "the time has come for you to depart."

Malchus made no reply. Ever since Serapion had relented toward him and taken him into his cell he had deluded himself with the hope that he might remain always with the old man as his servant. Serapion had become a vital part of his life and the sudden discovery that he himself had no part in the life of Serapion chilled him like the presence of death. His only friend was casting him off and he felt that the heart in his body was shriveling and dying. Serapion did not even care what happened to him, for he added nothing to the order that he must depart; and though he had from the first refused to advise Malchus in his choice of the hermit life, saying that such a choice must come from within and not from without, yet now this indifference cut him to the heart. He did not know how careful Serapion's treatment of him had been from the beginning, nor that many of the things which had seemed to be accidental occurrences had been arranged by the old man in order to show Malchus to himself and give him the needful experience out of which to make his choice. He did not even perceive that before sending him away Serapion had given him a foretaste of that absolute solitude which was the hermit's daily life, and then had waited until that experience had sunk into his mind and spread its influence there.

He stood for a long while silent with lowered head, struggling with his emotions. Then, laying aside all shame, he fell on his knees before Serapion. "Let me stay with you, my father," he begged. "Let me be your servant."

He knew that his request was craven, that he had weakly fallen away from that unshakable resolve with which he had clung to the hermit despite the fierce repulse he had received. Where was that courage now? He waited like a fawning animal for the hermit's reply.

Serapion replied without looking at him, "He who is a servant himself has no need of a servant."

"Where, then, shall I go?" whined Malchus.

"Your own heart must tell you where to go, my son. But, for to-day, go out into the desert a mile or two from here and spend the time till nightfall in meditation. Then return and tell me what you have decided, for to-morrow you must depart."

Malchus turned away in despair and began to descend the sandy slope to the plain below. At the bottom he turned to the right and followed the base of the hill which wavered away southward. It was strange, after having lived so long within the little circle about Serapion's cell, to be wandering alone in the boundless waste of sand. The forty days which he had passed with Serapion seemed to include the whole of his life. The rest was dreams, for the days of his former life had receded far behind him. But the sufferings through which he had passed had left him feeble and over-sensitive, and as an uprooted plant seeks roothold in the smallest handful of earth, so his broken spirit clung to Serapion. Faced with the necessity of severing himself again from human ties, he shrank and shuddered as a sick man shudders at the knife.

He had fallen unconsciously into the patient, unhurrying tread which he had learned during the long desert journey. The line of the sandhills now curved westward and, finding a shady hollow carved out of the hill face, he turned into it. A clatter startled the hollow; he had disturbed two great birds which towered suddenly upward and vanished over the sandbank, leaving behind them a heap, half skeleton, half carrion. Malchus hesitated. He had long grown accustomed to do violence to his old fastidiousness, but he remembered that, now that the birds were gone, the carrion would become a gathering place for swarms of flies, and so he turned aside and, finding another hollow a little farther on, he entered it and sat down.

It was the first time in his new life that he had set himself to meditate on earthly matters. Hitherto his meditations had been a discipline of the soul, teaching it to ascend by means of prayer into the presence of God. Now, having shared for a while the life of a hermit, he must decide whether he had the will and the strength to follow that life himself. But he had made that decision once for all when he had left Alexandria and followed the steps of Serapion. Why, then, should he decide again? But Malchus knew that in truth he must decide again, for the first decision was made in ignorance and under the impulsion of a great storm of passion. Now he must decide out of experience and a quiet mind. Yet in his present mood how difficult it would have been to decide if he had not had that first impetuous decision to fire his will. For now his will was weak and passive, he could, of himself, have willed nothing positive. That strong craving for a life of self-discipline and fierce austerity had died down now to a mere acquiescence; now he felt strongly only about the things from which he recoiled, for from his old life he still recoiled with all the force of his being.

An hour passed, then another, and by degrees, as a flower draws moisture from the soil in which it grows, his mind drank in something of the peace and silence which surrounded him. The shock had spent itself. He grew reconciled to the thought that he must leave Serapion. With the return of calm he could see more deeply into the hidden places of his spirit and he perceived that the days of stern discipline through which he had passed had planted in him a growing fervor, an aspiration which was becoming gradually more and more clear, as if the whole strength of body and soul were drawing itself together and fusing into one burning core. He felt, too, and mistook it for a virtue, the fanatic's pride in those mortifications of the flesh which in themselves are less than nothing. And as he fell to pondering again the hermit's life, the most arduous and the most exalted that man can pursue, his soul took fire and he longed to submit himself to the fiercest rigors of which man is capable. In the intensity of his emotions he rose to his feet and stood upright with glaring eyes and hands crossed upon his breast. The life he had chosen lay visibly before him, a ravaged waste beset with hunger and thirst and parching heat, with foul beasts and devils and the hidden terrors and torments of endless nights, and at the end of it that high Paradise of green boughs through which the wings of archangels moved like great lilies of scarlet and gold about the ineffable throne of God. From the wilderness around him he reached out his arms toward that remote salvation, struggling toward it across the obstacles that clogged his steps. But in a moment the vision had faded and he stood again englobed in the parched and glaring gold dust of the sandy hollow. In the exaltation of his dream he had staggered forward in the loose sand, and now he stood blindly wondering which of the two worlds was the real one, telling himself that this world of sand and heat which was so often present to his mind was but a ghost, and that the true reality was that spirit world to which the soul ascended only in the rare moments of divine ecstasy. As the sun dropped into the west and the material world melted again into the nightly holocaust, he knew that he stood on the edge of eternity and looked for a moment through the veil of things seen into the unspeakable mystery beyond; and as he turned back toward Serapion's cell, walking through the sunset as the three holy children walked through the fiery furnace, he felt that his mind had grown stern and unshakable as adamant....

When Serapion heard that Malchus was resolved to take upon himself the burden of the hermit he was filled with gladness. "Blessed be God and the Lord Jesus," he said, "who have given you the strength to choose aright. Far be it from me now, my son, to discourage you. Know then that six miles from here, to the south, there stands a lonely cell. Fifty years ago the blessed Poemon built it with his own hands and lived in it till the day when he rendered his soul to God. He died in the act of prayer, for when two of the brethren found him his dead body was bowed before the crucifix. Last time I went by the cell it was falling into ruin; it is for you to rebuild it. To-morrow, then, at dawn we will set out and you shall take with you tools—for I have some here—to help you to restore the place. You shall take also a half of our loaves and the water skin that I have just filled."

"But I cannot take the water skin, my father, for you have no other."

"Do not trouble yourself about that. If it were not right that you should have it, I would not give it to you. But go out now and scoop away the sand from the south wall of this cell. You will find buried there an ax and a spade."

While Serapion had been speaking, that tremulous sense, half fear, half delight, which is the very spirit of life, had crept into Malchus's heart and, going out as Serapion had directed him, he found the ax and the spade and brought them into the cell.

"To-night," said the hermit, "you must sleep, for when we have need of the body we must minister to the body."

Chapter
Nine

The air was gentle and cool when they started southward next morning an hour before the dawn, carrying the spade and ax, the water skin, and two large baskets full of loaves. The desert, pale and impalpable as mist, lay gray and smooth before them, and Malchus felt that he was withdrawing still farther from the living world of men and rivers and green things, pushing on into a realm void of all outward life, the very battle ground of the soul. His heart was firm; with every breath he seemed to inhale a courage and power that were not of this world. Soon the long sky line on their left had lightened to a pale, crystalline green which before long became so intense that the eastward facets of every stone, every sandy hummock and tuft of hard desert grass, gleamed with a wash of greenish light. Their own slowly plodding figures were modeled on the left sides, even to the smallest fold and feature, in green and gray, and sharp green edges danced upon the ax and spade and the burdens that rose and fell with their moving backs. And as if that light were sensibly cold, a cool breath from the east touched cheek and hand and leg. Then quite suddenly night had become day, for green had flushed into saffron and saffron into orange. Malchus looked behind him. Unbroken desert stretched northward; the high ledge on which Serapion's cell was perched, so humanly familiar to him that it had come to be for him the very center and meaning of the northern desert, was lost in formless desolation. But the south, in this morning light, held nothing sinister; its pure solitude wore the pale, flushed beauty of a flower, and as they tramped onward Malchus drew into his nostrils a subtle tremulous peace which thrilled both body and soul. He closed his eyes for a moment and it seemed that his brain tingled with its gentle intoxication. In the depths of his mind, like dusky weeds waving on the bottom of a dark pool, the knowledge that to-night and every night henceforward he would be alone, utterly alone in this empty world, sent up a bubble of pain into his consciousness, and for a moment he lived again through the emotions of his one solitary night in Serapion's cell. But soon his exaltation of mind had exorcised all human weakness and he strode along at the hermit's side, strong and full of courage. The sun grew fierce; their lips clove to their teeth and the spittle turned thick in their mouths, and as they moved stubbornly on they were surrounded by the acrid fume of their own sweat.

It was still early when Serapion pointed to a hill not far ahead of them. Gaunt and bare, it rose above the plain like a ruined city which the desert had swallowed. But there had never been any city there; it was primeval rock and sand, and century by century the winds and rains were eating it down to the level nonentity of the desert.

Serapion stretched out an arm. "Upon that eastern slope," he said, "a broken rock juts from the smooth line of the hill."

Malchus shaded his eyes with his hand. "Yes," he said, "I see it, midway between the summit and the level ground."

"That is the cell of the blessed Poemon," said Serapion. "In half an hour we shall reach it."

Malchus stared at the small tooth-like projection, and in face of the iron reality his heart sank. How willingly at that moment would he have bound himself to tramp on forever through the hot sand at Serapion's side. Vain wish, for step by step the cell became more real, more inescapable. Soon it would reach its full stature and swallow him forever....

Like two great vultures about a foundered ewe, Malchus and Serapion, the only moving things in a motionless world, paced about the cell, examining it carefully and scarring the virgin face of the sand with their footprints. The cell, like Serapion's, was a small square divided by a partition into an outer chamber and a small inner oratory. The eastern wall, which had contained the door, had fallen into ruin, and with it the roof had collapsed, and a part of the other walls, but the oratory was still intact, though it was half filled with drifted sand which, year by year, had been blown in through the doorway and window.

"Here, my son," said Serapion, "is a refuge already prepared for you. See how God has preserved the inner room, which is the place of prayer, for a sign to you that however much the outer man is afflicted and maimed, the soul within is a refuge which no power can destroy."

Malchus took up the spade and, going into the cell, began to shovel the sand from the oratory. It was hard work for a body weakened by long fasting, and as he labored the sweat ran down his body and fell from his face in drops into the sand. He labored all morning and on, with flagging strength, into the afternoon; but before he had half cleared the chamber he was breathless and exhausted. Meanwhile Serapion had been scooping away the sand outside the cell with his hands and had brought to light some of the stones of the ruined wall and also a wooden door and a great earthenware trough. They rested for a while in the shadow of the cell and ate and drank a little, "for," Serapion said, "when the body labors for the soul it is worthy of its hire. To-morrow," he continued, "you must pile these loose stones into a heap ready to hand for rebuilding, for if you do not the sand will soon bury them again. But, as you see, we have found none of the old roofing. The thatch has long since been scattered by the winds and who knows what has happened to the fallen beams. But two miles westward from here there is a grove. It is the place of which I told you, where there is a spring at which I fill my water skin. There you can cut some new beams for your roof and gather reeds or grass for the thatch. There, too, you will find fallen palm leaves for your weaving. Take up the ax and we will set out now. There I shall leave you, for I must go back to my cell. There is no wind, and will not be to-day or to-night, so you will easily find your way back here by following our footprints. But first let us move the loaves and water skin into the oratory and set up the door to close the entrance."

When this had been done, Malchus and Serapion set out slowly through the burning sand.... Malchus stood alone under tall palm trees whose fans wove a shady roof overhead. There were other trees, too, and parched herbage and spiny thickets. The ground was strewn with fallen palm leaves and here and there a fallen tree or a broken branch. The pool of the water spring was parched dry; withered leaves stuck like scabs to its white stones. Not a breath stirred. A silence more awful than the open silence of the desert held the place under a spell. Malchus felt himself crushed by the weight of its solitude. Serapion had just left him, carrying with him a great bunch of dry palm leaves which he had collected for his weaving, and Malchus, standing there alone, felt that there was no longer any reason for living. For some minutes he stood immovable, lost in a mournful revery; then with a great effort he flung off his oppression as if it had been a physical burden and took up the ax.

He chose a fallen bough of suitable thickness and began to lop off the twigs and then to hack it into equal lengths. The wood was hard and the loud ring of the ax broke profanely on the silence. He cut three roof timbers; it was the most he could carry; and he realized for the first time how many journeys to the grove he would have to make before he had collected enough wood to cover his roof. Now he hoisted the three timbers on to his shoulders, and, straightening his back, began to move away. Burdened as he was, his feet plowed deeply into the loose sand and several times he had to throw down the timbers to ease his bruised shoulders.

By the time he had come within the sight of his cell the light was reddening toward sunset. The scene before him reminded him of that other sunset when Serapion had gone away to fill the water skin. The same process would repeat itself now—the brief glaring holocaust of earth and heaven, and then the ashen death which so quickly followed it, and Malchus remembered the grim wraith which had taken substance before his eyes out of the sand. But Serapion had warned him not to allow his mind to indulge in idle imaginings, and, having thrown down his burden, he began to collect together some of the scattered stones of the ruin into an orderly pile. But before he could do much the light faded and he lifted away the door from the entrance of the oratory, went in, and, having set up the door again behind him, began to pray. It had been a strenuous day, and body and soul thrilled with a sense of accomplishment. He prayed easily and joyfully, asking for strength and blessing in the life that lay before him.

As the rolling tracts of desert stretched every way from the small point of earth which was his cell, so, it seemed to Malchus, his future life stretched forward into the years, clear and smooth from the moment in which he stood. He confronted it calmly, and a sense of greatness—the greatness of time and of space and the great spaces of the spirit before which the other greatnesses are as nothing—filled his soul. He rose refreshed from his prayer, and having eaten a loaf he lay down to sleep, for Serapion had warned him that during the period in which he labored daily at the rebuilding of his cell it would be necessary for him to take more food and sleep than at other times.

Throughout all that time Malchus lived contented, his energy divided between prayer and hard bodily labor. His body was healthy with the daily toil and his mind, sufficiently occupied by the work, kept clean and limpid; the turbid sediment of past miseries, vain regrets, and tormenting desires, had sunk away into unconsciousness. The cell growing daily before his eyes, the difficulties of inexperience confronted and solved, the expeditions to the grove for wood and later for stones—for he used up all the stones he could find near the cell and still needed more—kept his life free from monotony, and it was not until, after many weeks, the work was nearing completion that he remembered that the life he was living was not the hermit's life, but only the preparation for it. Then he began to look forward with something like fear to the day when all would be finished, for then there would again be a great emptiness in his life. Then he would stand face to face with himself once more and it would need all his strength to live worthily in the sight of God. Then would come an end, or almost an end, to his journeys to the grove and his life outside his cell, for Serapion had told him that the hermit must never leave his cell except in case of necessity. Malchus knew that the life he was leading at present was not in itself profitable, for though it protected him from evil, it did not enable him to advance in spiritual excellence. It was a life apart from good or evil, like the life of an animal: and, thinking how calm and even pleasant it had become to him, he remembered how Serapion had said that it was not well, except for a very little while, for the soul to be at rest.

That night he awoke in sudden fear with the sense that evil was close to him, and next morning he saw that the sand round about his cell was pitted by many footprints. They were the footprints of cloven-footed creatures. One of them, larger it seemed than the rest, had entered the doorless outer chamber and had stood at the very door of the oratory, and Malchus, knowing that the powers of evil were drawing closer about him, thenceforward forced himself to work and pray more strenuously and to eat and sleep less.

Chapter
Ten

And with the end of the labor of building came the end of contentment; for now all the easy purposes had gone out of his life and there remained only the high purpose of the hermit, too remote and difficult, it seemed, except for the rare moments of ecstasy. For some time he lived sunk in a profound depression. His body, deprived of healthy labor, rose up and tormented him. He prayed for long hours both day and night, but no comfort came to him from his prayers and it seemed to him that time had swept onward and left him stagnating, body and soul, in a shallow pool. His cell became hateful to him, and the weaving with which he tried to combat idleness was now a joyless drudgery. He felt nothing of that spiritual zeal which he had hoped would come to him when he had finally laid aside all worldly cares. Far from it. His life grew torpid and inert, lower than the life of the lowest beasts. His soul was an empty husk, his body vile, and his mind, emptied of all living occupation, began more and more to lose itself in the past. Old memories crowded about him and imprisoned him in their ghostly being and it was only by a fierce and exhausting watchfulness that he was able to drive them off. But they took revenge upon him by returning to him in his sleep, and he would wake horror-stricken from long rambling dreams of feasts and, worse, of sudden meetings with Helena or one of his earlier loves. One night Helena stood close beside him and touched him, sending a shudder through his flesh, half rapture and half terror, and he awoke suddenly with the sense of her penetrating every bone in his body. His cell was dark and cold as a tomb; a terrible silence held the desert and he felt the invisible presence of evil waiting breathless to fasten upon him. He sprang up and, beating his breast with his clenched fists, he prayed with a loud voice to shut out the unendurable silence. Could it be that in the sight of God a man was responsible even for his dreams? The violence of his nature was roused once again. By a great effort he threw off the deadly torpor which oppressed him and resolved to submit himself to a still more rigorous rule of life. Thereafter he ate only once in two days and slept for three hours only in forty-eight. He left his cell only once, at dawn, for his need, and when he did so he covered his face with his cloak for fear that the beauty of the world should weaken his spirit; and, that no opening should be left through which idle thoughts and waking dreams could assail him, he set himself an unalterable routine of recitation, prayer, meditation, and manual labor.

So he lived for many weeks; but in vain. For even when he had so schooled his body that his mouth and belly had almost ceased to clamor for water and food, his mind tormented him by urging him continually to go out from his cell, and whenever he ate or drank, the evil spirit of unrest tempted him, whispering, "Sip a little more water and eat another small crust of bread, for when these are finished it will be necessary for you to go out and seek more." But one morning, when only three more loaves remained, he opened the door of his cell and found a sackful of loaves leaning against it; and he took in the loaves, understanding that they had been sent for a sign that he must not leave his cell. But next day, when he was weaving, he finished the last of the palm leaves, and the spirit of unrest said, "Now at least you must go out, for unless you collect more leaves you will be without work for your hands." But Malchus hardened his resolve and, taking the largest mat he had woven, he picked it to pieces and so provided himself with enough material for many days' work. But soon he had finished the last drop of his supply of water and the spirit of unrest within him was glad, because now he would have to go to the grove to draw water, since man cannot live for long without water. But Malchus was strict with himself and determined that he would wait for a whole day without water, so that he might discover beyond doubt if it was God's will that he should go out of his cell. And throughout the next day no water came; his lips and tongue were parched and even the little water in the trough had been sucked up by the heat, so that he could not soak the leaf strips for his weaving. Then joy sprang into his heart and he took down the water skin and went out into the sunlight.

The day was still mild and it was a relief to move his cramped limbs and to gaze once again into the pure, unconfined freedom of the desert. The air was clean and cool against his skin and he recalled that moment in the green hollow when he had lowered himself slowly and rapturously into the pool. His progress was slow because of the deep, powdery sand and the weakness of his body, but it had now become natural to him that the ground on which he walked should always be sand, and he plodded on undistressed till the delightful green of the grove came in sight, and then took him to its shadowy heart. The spring, as he had expected, was flowing again. Where the white, parched stones had been, a crystal basin stood brimful, and the spell of the water had called up a fresh leafy fringe about it with flowers springing up among the green. Sprays of silver bubbles twirled up through the dark, clear, solid water. It was as if the spirit of peace and coolness had taken form in a crystal. Malchus sat down by the spring and wept. He made no attempt to restrain his tears, but allowed them to flow on, finding a relief in them as though all the hard and stubborn things in his heart were melting away. After he had sat there for a long time he rose and filled the water skin and, laying it down by the spring, he began to collect the fallen palm leaves. And as he roved from palm tree to palm tree with his eyes continually on the ground, the pleasure-lover in him kept asking him why he should not always live in this grove and why Serapion should not live there, too. What had they gained by living solitary in the barren desert that they could not have gained by living here? Then the fanatic in him showed him to himself as the great saint depending on no earthly support whether of human love, earthly beauty or pleasant food and drink; and, thinking of the weeks during which he had lived in solitude and of the exiguous diet he had endured, he grew reconciled to his arid life, for was he not already of that company of chosen souls whose lives are beautiful in the sight of God?

He had collected enough palm leaves, and now he raised his eyes from the ground. He had wandered a long way from the spring, and, hoisting the bunch of leaves on his shoulder, he turned and began to make his way back to it, for there he had left the water skin. When he reached the spring he was astonished to see a man sitting beside it. His hair was grizzled; he was almost an old man. Two newly skinned pelts lay on the ground beside him. He had laid them with the inward sides uppermost to dry in the sun. The livid surfaces shone like polished granite and flies buzzed loudly about them.

"Where do you come from?" Malchus asked him, "and how long have you been in the desert?"

"I am a hunter, as you see," the stranger replied, "and I have been in this country for eleven months. During all that time you are the first man I have seen."

The two, unwilling to part in that inhuman solitude, stayed long in talking, their eyes scanning each other as if in wonder at the sight of a human creature. At length, with a sigh Malchus took up his water skin and, full of sadness and discouragement, journeyed toward his cell. When his knees began to fail under him and it became necessary for him to rest a little, he threw down his burden and, lying down beside it, fell into a melancholy meditation. Then he rose to his knees and smiting himself upon the face cried out: "O Malchus, well may you think that you have done nothing, for you have not endured even the solitude of this hunter, who is a man of the world and no hermit." And he went on his way even more slowly than ever, for despair was upon him, and he felt a great reluctance to return to his cell. It was as though during those few hours of liberty he had escaped into another world—a tender world of green leaves, running water, and human sympathy—and at the first sight of his cell across the sandhills he felt like one returning to prison. Yet he knew that it was his true self which was driving him back and which told him now that he had sinned that day in lingering beyond what was necessary in the grove and delaying in talk with the hunter....

With the night, as if it were the instant sign of his relapse, the creatures of darkness gathered about his cell, howling in a dismal, mocking chorus, answered by wilder shrieks from the distance, as though other hordes were hastening up from the heart of the desert. Once there was a beating upon his door, as if the evil spirits, grown bolder, were clamoring for entrance. Then a long silence; and Malchus listened, his forehead wet with fear, for he knew that the demons had not departed, but were lurking silent about him. Suddenly some soft, light thing struck him on the face. He flung out his arms in terror and loathing, and there followed a wild beating of hands against the bars of his window. He dared not raise his voice for fear he should betray the corner in which he cowered; but he prayed silently, fervently, and without remission, often making the holy sign upon the darkness. Then, as if tortured by the sign, the creatures set up their howls again. It seemed that they were all round the cell; he could hear them breathing and buffeting against the door. It was not until the dawn was near that all became silent again, and now it seemed that the silence was empty. The evil spirits had gone. Malchus, exhausted by fear and the urgency of his praying, fell asleep.

Many hours later he awoke to a gentle, continuous noise, as if heavy drops were pattering on the sand or the sands themselves on every side were seething and shuffling with a life of their own. His fears leaped up once more, but when he opened his eyes he saw that the sun was shining. The honest light of day restored his courage and he rose and opened the door of his cell. His heart leaped to his throat, but next moment he was reassured, for when he had realized what he saw it was harmless enough. A large flock of sheep was passing his door. The expanse of broad, woolly backs spread before him, each with its own agitated movement. It was like the Nile in flood, its surface broken into hundreds of muddy waves and eddies. At the edges of the flock he saw the meek shaven heads, and here and there the pink strip of a panting tongue. The rank, oily smell of fleeces filled the air. An old shepherd was leading them—the only upright figure in the humble crowd—and seeing Malchus at his door, he turned aside to speak to him, sitting down by the cell with his back against its wall. He was a Lybian and it was with some difficulty that they conversed. The flock, deprived of its leader, stood still, and as Malchus and the shepherd talked, their talk was accompanied by a chorus of melancholy bleating. Above its long droning rose individual voices of every tone from the deep and guttural to the plaintive wail. It was a sound infinitely hopeless, like the crying of children led into captivity.

"What are you doing here in the desert?" Malchus asked the shepherd. "There is nothing here for your sheep to eat."

"I am taking them down to the marsh of Scete to eat the green herb," the shepherd replied. "My village is twenty miles from here, and once a year, after the flooding of the river, we lead the flocks down to eat of the herb. Now they are hungry and exhausted, as you see, but I hope to bring them to the marsh by midnight."

He wore a little bag slung about his shoulders, and now he pulled it round on to his lap and opened it. Malchus saw that it contained a bunch of some kind of greenery. "What is this?" he asked.

"This is my food," the old man replied.

"And have you nothing else to eat?"

The shepherd shook his head. "For the last thirty years," he answered, "I have eaten nothing else. I eat once a day and drink as much water as I need. By living thus I am more free than if my body needed the food which can be found only in villages and human habitations. I am free, too, of the need of money and I give the wages paid me by the owner of the sheep to those of my people who need it." While speaking the shepherd had risen to his feet, and the wide expanse of woolly backs, as if in response to his movement, was stirred once again by numberless agitations. Then Malchus fell down at the feet of the shepherd: "O my father," he wailed, "I imagined in my pride that I had attained to abstinence, but you are worthy of a greater reward than I, for I have eaten bread which is made for me by others and have drunk water which another has drawn for me."

The old man looked down upon Malchus in bewilderment, and then as if wishing to escape, turned and moved slowly upon his way. And immediately the flock began to advance, jostling together and then expanding; then, closing together again, it settled into its habitual density, following the slow steps of its shepherd.

"When do you return?" Malchus shouted after the old man.

The shepherd slowly turned his head. "You will not see me again," he shouted back. "They will graze along the marsh northward for several days and we shall return another way."

Soon the faintest sound of them had drained away into the silence of the desert, and by noon even the sight of them was no more than a pale irregular stain on a linen cloth....

During that day Malchus found that his despair, so far from having been relieved by his recent escape from solitude, had increased. Pondering in his cell upon his meetings with the hunter and the shepherd, he understood that God had driven him out of his cell in order that he might learn from them that all he had achieved in the life of solitude and fasting was in itself nothing and that others had accomplished much more in the mere course of their business; and as he examined his life, he knew that, for all his desire to pursue excellence, it was stagnant. Yet what else could he do but pray? Despair came upon him, and thenceforward he was even more restless than before. He found himself inventing small reasons to leave his cell, and when he had set his mind against them he felt none of the triumph of conquest, but only a darker despair. And more and more he was tormented by dreams, dreams that rose from his buried desires, setting before him fearful temptations to which sometimes he yielded with a frenzied self-abandonment. Then he awoke with the terror of sin upon him and the dreadful certainty that evil—evil in the material form of horrible physical presences—was closing inexorably about him. In the worst of all these dreams it seemed that his whole life had become a mockery and a snare. It was the familiar scene of a feast at the house of Diocles, the scene that haunted him so persistently. He himself, in the dream, kept changing from the old Malchus to Malchus the hermit; for his impulse was to obey his desires, but when he began to do so immediately a freezing fear held him back. And all the material things of his dream changed, too, from one nature to another. He reached out his hand to a peach, but when it touched his lips it was changed to vileness and corruption. The wine in his glass turned in his mouth to mud and sand. Last of all, Helena, leaping from one of the couches as the girl Thaïs had done at that last feast in the house of Diocles, came across the dining hall toward him with her lovely, half-mocking smile. He smiled back at her, stretching out his arms; but, when she drew nearer, a white terror like leprosy laid hold of him and he thrust her off, covering his face with one hand. But Helena forced herself upon him, bending over him, weighing upon him; and gazing up at her in mortal terror, he saw that she had changed to a vile hag with parched skin and bleared and yellow eyes. He struggled wildly. A great weight on his chest smothered his cries, but at length he broke through the dream into consciousness as through a thicket of terrifying deceits. He was awake now, but still some foul creature was fastened upon him. He felt its weight; the filthy stench of it sickened him. He thrust out his hands and they touched coarse hair. Then a great cry burst from him and he was free. Close under his window a loud howling broke out. Showers of sand fell upon his face and the door of his cell swung to and fro on its hinges. He sprang to his feet and ran out in terror into the open. There he was received into clouds of wind-blown sand, and, rushing on through the storm, he descended the slope, half running and half falling, to the level ground below. He ran on in the blind hope that he was running toward Serapion, and at last, stumbling in the clogging sand, he fell on his face and lay where he fell, insensible.

Chapter
Eleven

When he came to himself the night was gone. The dawn, an unfathomable dome of cool yellow flame, towered immensely above the yellow aisles and ambulatories of the desert.

Having spent some time in prayer, he went on his way northward, confident that when he came within the region of Serapion's cell he would recognize it. But as he labored on, the country was still strange—a land, it seemed, never before visited by living thing—and the hour passed by at which he should have arrived, and the sun rose toward noon, dropping its fiery weight upon the sand and striking up again from the baked sand with the heavy glow of a furnace, till it seemed to Malchus that he was being tortured before a great fire. His lips were gummed to each other and some nerve or artery in his brain pulsed as if it would burst and destroy him. When noon was long past, he turned round in despair, but, thinking it possible that he had wandered out too far in the direction of the river, he bore a little to the westward as he made his way south again. But still the desert had an alien face, and as it drew on toward evening he gave up all hope that he would find his way and, exhausted, bewildered, and full of a vague dread, he was on the point of lying down to rest when he saw that he was standing a few yards from the foot of the familiar slope. Above him he could see the upper part of the cell itself, and outside, near the edge of the slope, a figure was standing immovable with arms raised sideways in the form of the Cross. At the sight of it he reeled and fell, as though some tension within him had snapped. It was as if all his troubles had suddenly fallen from him. He was so weak that he had to climb the slope on his hands and knees.

When he reached the terrace, Serapion had lowered his arms and was waiting as though he had expected him. "Prisoner! Prisoner!" he called out to him. "Why have you cast away your liberty?" And Malchus knew that by liberty Serapion meant the liberty of his cell, and that he called him prisoner because in his wisdom he had understood that he was a slave to his unrest. Seeing that Malchus was exhausted, Serapion made him sit down outside the cell and, bringing out water and bread and some dried dates, he bade him eat and drink; and Malchus told the old man all his troubles, asking him if in the sight of God a man was responsible for his dreams.

"Have you not read," answered Serapion, "what our Redeemer answered Satan when Satan had said that he would send his people against the people of God? 'And if they do evil unto thy chosen ones,' said Satan, 'I cannot help it, and I will trip them up even though I can do so only in dreams of the night.' But our Redeemer replied: 'If a still-born child can inherit his father's possessions, then also dreams shall be accounted a sin to my chosen ones.'"

"And what of evil thoughts?" asked Malchus.

"It is Satan, not we, who sows them," Serapion replied; "but it is our business not to welcome them. Evil thoughts are like the savors of boiled meat and roast meat that issue from a cook-house. All who go past smell the savors, but one man will go in and eat, and another, who does not wish to eat, will smell the savors as he passes and go on his way."

Then Malchus spoke of the spirit of unrest which had taken hold of him, urging him ceaselessly to go forth from his cell, and he told Serapion how, when at last he had been compelled to go out, he had met the hunter and the shepherd and learned from their manner of life that his own fasting and loneliness were as nothing, "so that now," he said, "my life seems vain and as it were without salt and I do not any longer derive profit from the relaxation of weaving. It is as though God had turned his face from me. What then, must I do?" he asked; "for whether I stay in my cell and fight the temptation or whether I yield to it and go out, my trouble continues. Help me, my father, with your wisdom and experience, for if you do not, the powers of evil will fasten upon me inescapably."

The old man looked kindly upon Malchus and, sitting down beside him, began to instruct him. "When the spirit of unrest is upon you," he said, "you must fight against it and not fly from it, for if you go out of your cell you will find that from which you fly wherever you go. But when you have conquered the temptation you can go out, for then you will go out in a state of peace. But even if you cannot escape from this trouble, still you must stay in your cell, since this, for the hermit, is the first of rules. Go back, then, when you have had some sleep here, and close the door of your cell. But, for the rest, you must eat, drink, and sleep as much as you desire and you must give up the weaving, for this is no longer profitable to you."

"But if I give up fasting, watching, and labor," said Malchus, in amazement, "shall I not be falling away still more from the hermit rule?"

"Have I not told you, my son," answered Serapion, "that fasting, watching, solitude, and labors, and even virginity itself, are in themselves nothing, but are good only as a means to spiritual excellence?"

But to the self-torturing nature of Malchus it was hard not to believe that these things had a virtue in themselves, and the thought of relinquishing what he had so hardly achieved filled him with fear.

"Do as I tell you, my son," said Serapion, seeing his hesitation, "and afterward, as other inclinations come to you, follow them so long as they are without offense. And in your prayers do not ask for one thing after another, but let your prayer be about the thing that is troubling you at the time. Then, after you have overcome that trouble, you may turn in prayer to other things. But if, when you are troubled by one passion, you set it aside and pray about another, the first passion will never be wholly cast out. For you it is necessary to conquer the spirit of unrest, and to do this you must stay in your cell and go out only in case of extreme necessity. To-morrow I will accompany you to your cell and bring away the mats you have woven, for I am going soon to Alexandria to sell those that I have made and I will sell yours at the same time. For you it would not yet be safe to go into the world even for a few hours."

When Malchus had returned to his cell and taken up the life which Serapion had prescribed, he began to discover by degrees the wisdom of the old man's instructions. For at first the consolation of food, drink, and sleep and the escape from the monotony of weaving loosened the cord of his unrest and a mellowness came into his heart. It became once more an easy and joyful thing to pray and it seemed to him that his prayers were answered. When evil thoughts came to him he was no longer afraid, but he turned aside his attention from them, saying: "I have nothing to do with this thought and I do not desire it. Let the sin of it be upon Satan." And after a little time he felt a desire to work again at the weaving of mats, and, taking up one of the neglected palm leaves, he began to tear it into strips, and when he had enough strips he put them to soak, and next day he fell to work with the old zeal, weaving a mat of wonderful fineness. And as he wove he reflected that even so the meditations and prayers of the righteous are woven together into a garment for the soul. After another interval of time he felt the impulse to rise in the night and pray, and then also to deny himself food and drink. So by overcoming the spirit of unrest he was drawn back, of his own desire, to the hermit's way; and for some time all seemed to be well with him.

But not for long. For soon the evil spirits, seeing that they could no longer dismay him by evil dreams and terrors of the night, began to tempt him subtly with things which seemed to be innocent and beautiful. And one night, after Malchus had been fasting for three whole days, an evil spirit appeared to him in the form of that vision of a winged man which once he had seen standing on the altar of Serapion's cell. Again Malchus saw that the feathers of his wings were plumed with golden beams and he was filled with delight and wonder and, crouching upon his knees before the altar, he remained for a long time gazing in ecstasy at the angel. Then the angel bent toward him and spoke.

"Malchus," he said, "I have been sent to comfort and exhort you because of your great abstinence. For the abstinence of the shepherd is now as nothing compared with yours."

And next day the evil spirits entered his cell in the form of flies, and when they saw that Malchus refrained from eating and drinking on that day also (though it had been his purpose to fast for three days only), they laughed and clapped their hands; but their laughter was nothing more, for Malchus, than the droning of flies.

Toward evening two young men came and knocked at the door and one of them said to Malchus: "Give us something to eat and some water to drink, my father, for we are broken with hunger, our mouths are parched with thirst, and we have still a long way to go."

Malchus brought them in and set bread and water before them; but he himself stood apart and ate nothing. And the elder of the young men said to him, "Will you not eat with us, my father?"

But Malchus shook his head. "Food and drink," he said, "are not necessary to me."

At that the two young men made a sign of astonishment to each other and Malchus heard the elder whisper to the younger, "This is a great saint." Then, having finished eating and drinking, they rose and went on their way. But as soon as they had gone out it came into Malchus's mind that he ought to have given them food for their journey also; and he took two loaves from the sack and hurried to the door to call them back. But the desert both far and near was empty and there was no new footprint about the door.

Malchus closed the door and, dropping the loaves into the sack, fell to thinking. His mind was troubled by what had happened and his trouble increased when he remembered that by refusing to eat with the young men he had made a boast of his abstinence; for true abstinence, as Serapion had often told him, does not concern that which is without, but only that which is within, and it is better to lay by for a moment the rule of abstinence than to fall into pride and boastfulness. Throughout that night Malchus prayed, confessing his sin and asking for strength to overcome pride; but as he prayed there crept into his mind the memory of the vision of the angel and, believing still that he had acquired merit by his abstinence, he took comfort. But it seemed, that night, as though all the creatures of the desert were holding sinful revel, for far over the sandhills the harsh laughter of fiends echoed through the darkness; and Malchus, hearing it, trembled, not knowing what it might signify. But because he had repented of his second act of pride, the power of the evil spirits over him was diminished: yet since he was not wholly purged of pride, being still blind to that former presumption into which he had been led by the false vision, the hold of Satan was not entirely loosed from him. And Satan, who, like a skillful hunter, is wont to pursue his prey slowly and by artful delays, was content to withdraw to a distance from Malchus till a convenient occasion should come.

But, alone in that waste where all things, down to the meanest herb and the smallest grain of sand, are instruments in the hands of Good and Evil, and where the sounds of winds and the crying of beasts are but the earthly embodiments of the voices of angels and devils, Malchus felt that evil had receded from him, and his life for a time became calm and untroubled, and his prayers and the work of his hands were as an unwavering flame ascending into the presence of God. But after many weeks were past the water skin was again empty and it became necessary for Malchus to go out and refill it. And as soon as the heat of noon began to abate he set out, keeping his eyes on the ground that lay before his feet. But an evil spirit had gone before him.

Having arrived at the edge of the grove, he threw down the water skin and began first to collect the fallen palm leaves; for whenever he came to the grove for water he replenished also his stock for weaving. But as he moved from tree to tree, with his eyes on the ground, he came down toward the little valley through which the water overflowed from the spring. The stream was broad and smooth, and tall canes in crowds waded in its shallows, hanging their long green pennons above the water; and as Malchus raised his eyes he saw through the screen of canes that something was moving on the further bank.

It was a girl with a bunch of long canes in her arms, and just as Malchus caught sight of her she laid the bunch on the ground and, kneeling down, bound it together in a bundle. But Malchus, forgetting in a flash all the strict and careful discipline of his new life, stood suddenly still in the grip of an overwhelming excitement, and, leaning against the bole of a palm tree, he stared at her like a tiger watching a drinking gazelle. When she had made the bundle fast she rose upright with a quick, youthful movement. One of her arms moved. She was undoing her sleeveless cotton garment. Then she wriggled her shoulders free and the gown dropped to her feet. She looked surprisingly small and neat without the clumsy gown; her spare, compact little body with the quick, full curves of first maturity shone softly like honey-colored bronze. She stepped clear of the gown and, like some delicately moving little animal, walked down into the shallow water. At first the pool only covered her ankles, then step by step it rose to her knees, and she went on, balancing herself with outstretched arms, till it was more than halfway up each thigh. She carried some small thing in her right hand. It was a knife, and bending down she began to cut the canes, the left hand grasping the tall stems and the right dipping down to cut below the water-level. When she had cut all she was able to hold, she waded back to the bank and laid them by the bundle, and then she returned into the stream to gather more. Where could she have come from? It seemed that she must be not a mortal girl, but the naiad of the spring, and that if she were disturbed she would surely dive down with one slim movement and a single hollow, musical splash, to her home under the water. When at last she had cut all the canes she wanted, she paused for a moment in the water and looked about her.

Malchus had all the while stood immovable, leaning against the tree trunk and partly hidden by it. A suppressed trembling shook him like a palsy, and the girl, as her eyes wandered idly over the bank and among the trees, suddenly caught sight of the parched hairy face and the eyes fixed hungrily upon her. She stared back at Malchus for a moment, and then, turning her back with the charming contempt of a young animal, went up on to the bank and slowly slipped on her gown. Malchus, too, stirred himself, and with a deep-drawn sigh began to retrace his steps to where he had left the water skin. When he had found it and carried it to the spring he was once more within sight of where the girl had been. She was gone now, and, having drawn the water, he departed slowly under the burden. He felt no repentance. His heart was hard and exultant. At that moment he revolted with the whole strength of his being against the God who demanded of His chosen the renunciation of earthly love, the beauty of the flesh, and the joys of the senses, and he was glad that, instead of flying at once from the grove as it was his duty as a hermit to do, he had seized the moment and obeyed the clamorous impulse. But as the seething of the senses died down and he found himself once again in the hard, pure desert, he knew that in that brief hour he had brought to naught all the long months of stern living and that the powers of evil had gained a great ascendancy over him. Perhaps that very night evil spirits would break down the door of his cell, and burst in the window bars, and lay hold upon him body and soul, torturing him until the weak body could resist no longer. Bodily death at such a time would bring with it the death of the immortal soul—an everlasting exile from the sight of the God against whom he had revolted. The thought overwhelmed him with horror and, staggering on his way toward the refuge of his cell, he called upon God like a wild creature howling at the sky. "O God," he wailed, "save me from the death I deserve. Remember, O God, my former life, that I loved without discrimination all things beautiful, and consider how great was my temptation. For was she not beautiful, O God, beautiful as a young gazelle? How can it be that what is so beautiful has no part in the divine nature?" Then, feeling that he had spoken blasphemy, he ceased and began to repeat aloud penitential psalms and prayers for the forgiveness of sins. So he hastened, feeble and breathless, on his way, looking neither before him nor behind, where, on the edge of the grove, the slim, straight-robed figure of a girl stood with one hand shading her eyes, watching him.

When he reached his cell he threw down the water skin and the palm leaves, not caring, in his despair, what became of them, and, flinging open the door, he staggered in and fell on his face in the oratory. At first he lay as one stunned, neither praying nor thinking, but after an hour of this prostration he came to his senses and began to pray feverishly, torrentially, like a man in a burning house or a sinking ship, pouring out passionate phrases and ejaculations so rapidly that his mind almost ceased to follow the sense of what his lips uttered. As he prayed, the light began to fail, and it seemed that the shadows that gathered silently into his cell were bodily presences. Soon the darkness would come, and with it the hosts of Satan into whose power he had so recklessly given himself.

But the night fell calm and silent. Not the remotest howl of hyena or jackal disturbed the crystal silence. And as the silence continued unbroken, Malchus, racked by fearful expectancy, became fascinated by it like a bird by the eye of a snake. He waited cold and breathless, more and more certain every minute that it would be shivered suddenly, appallingly, by some diabolical tumult which would be the prelude to his destruction. His mind had grown numb beneath the unendurable suspense, when at last the silence was broken and all his being concentrated into the one act of listening.

Instead of the horrors he was awaiting, it was a gentle, clear voice which had called softly outside his cell, A broken square of primrose-colored moonlight lay on the wall and floor of the oratory. For a time there was deep silence again. Then near the door the same sweet voice sent a thrill of delight through him, speaking a word that he did not understand. A sense of unreality possessed him; he must be asleep and dreaming, and he remembered with a feeling of infinite relief that Serapion had told him that a man is not responsible in the sight of God for his dreams. His fears were gone now, but his sense was still alert and soon he heard a faint sound in the outer room of his cell. He was too exhausted to wonder what it could be, and next moment something touched him in the dark—a hand, it seemed; but not the fierce hand of evil, but a gentle, ingratiating hand that stroked him. Malchus did not move. As in a dream, his will was nerveless and he lay with eyes closed while the groping hand explored him. Then two arms wound themselves about him and a soft cheek was laid against his. "Helena!" he whispered, ardently, and suddenly he threw off his passivity and, freeing his arms, he clasped to his own body the warm body that lay on the floor beside him.

Chapter
Twelve

He awoke next morning to a cold despair. He knew that what he had experienced had been no dream, and he knew, too, that one small spark of consciousness, which he had willfully muffled, had affirmed at the time that it was real. He had sinned consciously and willingly; his delusion had been deliberate. He dared not pray, for to take the name of God into his mouth, vile as he was, would itself be mortal sin; and even if he had dared to pray, the prayers of a wretch like himself, who had implored God's help and protection only to scorn it when the moment of temptation came, would, he knew, be no better than an insolent mockery in the ear of Heaven. Now he was alone indeed, cut off not only from the worldly life which he had abandoned, but also from the holy life of the desert and the eternal life which is its reward. He was exhausted by long fasting and the violence of his emotions; and as with eyes fixed starkly on vacancy he contemplated his state, the horror of it numbed his understanding. "It is impossible," he muttered to himself, "impossible that it was not a dream." Slowly and painfully he rose to his feet. His brain reeled and for a moment he could do no more than stand, steadying himself with both hands pressed against the walls. Then with groping hands and feet he staggered into the outer room and so to the doorway of the cell. On the smooth sand outside, the print of small bare feet was set as a witness against him; and, as if for a sign that all his good works had been brought to naught, all the mats that he had woven were gone. Then his gaze fell on the sack of loaves, and a light came into his eyes, for he saw in food and drink a last consolation for his misery. He plunged both arms into the sack, bringing out all the loaves that were left, and, carrying them outside the cell, he sat down beside the full water skin which he had left there on the previous evening. He untied the neck and dipped each loaf into the water. But to dip them only was not enough; the loaves were still too hard to eat. He gnawed at one, holding it in both hands and chawing at it like a dog at a bone. But he could not break the crust, and at last he flung it away from him in fury and, getting on to his knees, he reached an earthenware dish from the table and set the loaves to soak. And as they soaked he crouched beside them, snatching impatiently at one and another and putting them to his teeth. Crouching solitary there, now immovable, now breaking into convulsive activity as he seized a loaf and raised it to his mouth, he looked like a great ape playing with stones. At last the loaves were soft enough and he fell upon them ravenously, stuffing fragment after fragment into his mouth and then bowing his face to the dish and sucking in draughts of water to soften the mass. So he fed, a fierce and uncouth spectacle, while water and a paste of masticated bread exuded from the corners of his mouth and clung to his ragged beard. He did not remember how on that day a year ago he had lain, exquisitely dressed, at table in his own house, the host of one of the most marvelous of all the marvelous feasts for which he and his friends were famed throughout Alexandria. At that feast the guests had been delighted by the novelty of the little silver ovens in which the slaves handed small newly baked loaves, each cunningly molded into a fantastic shape.

When he had eaten all the bread, he sat for a while, staring before him; then untying the water skin again, he took a long draught from it and, letting it slip from his hands so that it lay gulping out its contents into the thirsty sand, he rose and reached for his staff. Without a glance behind him he stepped out into the empty desert. His mind was empty, barren. He had no plan, no hope, nothing but the instinct to fly from a place accursed, to fly further and further into the desert, as if by unceasing flight he could at last outrun the terrible consequences of his sin. But the moment he left the shelter of the cell an invisible host of evil flung itself upon him, beating up the sand in clouds into his eyes and mouth, wrapping him round in a bewildering whirlwind and hurling broadcast the heap of palm leaves which on the previous evening he had flung down outside the door. He blundered on blindly, with no thought of his direction, beating the air with his hands in an attempt to drive off the unseen adversaries that surrounded him with jeers and whistlings, owlish hoots and derisive laughter. Behind him he heard his door beat and beat again upon its hinges, and he knew that demons had taken possession of his deserted cell and were desecrating it with their foul revelries. He ran on blindly, falling headlong and rising again, till his strength was exhausted and he lay where he fell....

He opened his eyes. He was lying on the level plain of the desert. Long screens of blowing sand, long filmy processions of sand which had taken on human and animal forms, came streaming toward him out of the distance. There was sand everywhere. His eyes and mouth and ears were full of sand; sand coated his skin and filled his clothes, and the ground, the air, and the sky were full of flying sand. It was as if the desert itself had risen against the outcast, had taken on a fierce, vengeful mobility which would soon engulf him, consume him, disintegrate and dry him till he himself was nothing but a cloud among clouds of blowing sand, whirling restlessly from desert to desert, with no more life than a vague and changing form and a thin, crying voice like the voice of despair. Dust to dust; ashes to ashes. The words whirled in the emptiness of his mind as the sand in the empty air, and he nestled his head in his clasped arms and lay on his face, still as a boulder, while the sand hailed against his leather tunic and mounded itself about him till it overflowed in rivulets over his neck and arms and legs.

With darkness the storm grew fiercer. The wind shrieked and howled about his prostrate, half-buried body and through the wind came other and wilder howls, now far off, now close and terrible. Then something touched him, and again and again. Something heavy and four-footed stood upon his back. It moved, and then he felt a hot snuffling breath against his cheek. He turned his head in horror and opened his eyes. Green eyes stared down at him. He clenched his fist and struck out. The creature moved away, but slowly, and Malchus felt that it was still lurking close by, with others, waiting its time. Then a more terrible outburst of howls severed the night. He was surrounded by howling, yelling beasts. Raising his head, he could see their eyes glinting, now green, now red, all round him. They beat him, trampled on him; their claws tore at his naked arms and legs. He sprang to his feet and flung himself forward, waving his arms, and there was a scattering of vague shapes in the darkness and the wind was for a moment more densely loaded with sand. No longer daring to lie down, he moved onward, slowly, feebly, painful step by step, and only when it grew light did he dare to submit and, abandoning all effort, sink to the ground in a stupor.

When he awoke he was sitting up, with a strong arm supporting him. A young man knelt beside him, offering him a cup of water. A cake of dried dates lay on a flat stone beside him. He drank the water greedily and then ate the dates; then he turned his eyes to the young man's. They were deep, untroubled blue eyes like the eyes of a child. As they met Malchus's they were full of a gentle solicitude. "How do you come to be here, so far from mankind?" he asked Malchus.

"I was a hermit," Malchus replied, in a voice that was hardly more than a sigh.

"I too am a hermit," answered the young man. "My cell is only a few yards away. When I came out this morning I found you lying here." He helped Malchus to rise. "Come into my cell," he said, "for you are half dead."

Malchus shook his head. "I cannot," he said, "for I am not worthy. I have committed the unforgivable sin and I must go my way."

"Whither are you going?"

Malchus pointed forward into the desert.

"But can I do no more for you, my brother?" the young man asked him.

"Pray for me," Malchus replied as he began to move away. "Pray that I myself may some day dare to pray again."

The young hermit stood watching the meager, plodding figure which soon the desert gathered out of his sight into its arid heart....

Week after week Malchus pushed on. At first he was fed by the hermits upon whose lonely cells he chanced often enough to escape starvation, for in those days the number of hermits in the desert was very great. But after a while the cells grew less frequent and he began to enter a stark country which seemed to have been stripped of all life. Only once in that quarter did he come upon a cell. It stood gaunt upon the naked rock, itself more like a rock than a house built by mortal hands. In it lived an aged and venerable hermit who had spoken with the great Saint Anthony face to face. There were no springs in that waterless waste and the ancient man was compelled to collect in sponges the dew which fell only in the last two months of the year. Every evening he set out the sponges on his roof and before dawn he squeezed the dew out of them into a cistern. In this way he was able to collect enough water for the whole year. He set food and water before Malchus and questioned him about his journey.

"I do not know whither I am going, my father," Malchus replied, "for I who was a hermit have committed the unforgivable sin and I fly onward into the pathless wilderness that I may escape from humanity and from my sin."

"For him that truly repents," the old man answered, "there is no unforgivable sin. But if, being a hermit, you committed sin, it was because you did not perpetually set death, and that which follows death, before your eyes; for he who has his eyes perpetually fastened on death comes to a state of understanding which forever releases the soul from temptation. Each day the hermit must set his soul to contemplate this mortal body of ours and must speak thus with the voice of his soul to each part of it in turn: 'O legs, which have strength to move yourselves and to stand up, stand up before the presence of your Lord.' And to the hands: 'O hands, so soon to decay and crumble into dust and never again be clasped together; before that hour of dissolution comes, stretch yourselves out in supplication to the Lord.' And to the whole body: 'O body, rise and worship God and bear me up that I may offer praise and prayer to the Lord with a good heart, before we are separated one from another and I go down into the place of forgetfulness and am fettered in everlasting darkness, and you consume away and rot and become a thing of loathing and putrefaction. For if you follow after the delights and pleasant things of the world you will surely cast me into never-ending torment.' My son," the old man concluded, "if you meditate thus always until the truth of these things has bitten itself into your heart and mind, it will be impossible for you thereafter to commit sin."

Then Malchus, having eaten and drunk, arose and bade the holy man farewell.

Thenceforward all human habitation ceased, but still he traveled onwards. His food was now the meager herbage springing in rare places among stones or in the frail shadow of thorn-bushes, and his scarce drink was from a desert well or some foul and clotted pool which still lingered stagnating among the sandhills.

One morning, after many desolate days, he saw far ahead of him on the pale floor of the desert as it were a ragged black cloth. It was about four hours after dawn, and as he walked on he saw also that the desert before him was streaked with green. Then, as he drew nearer, he saw that what had seemed to be a black cloth was in truth a great herd of browsing beasts; and when, at noon, he came up with them, he found that they were buffaloes. They were feeding upon the green herb which sprang plentifully in that place. Some of them lifted their great lowering heads as he approached, and he was afraid and was about to turn aside, when two figures, dark as themselves, stood upright in the midst of the herd. When they saw Malchus they began to come toward him, making their way among the beasts. And Malchus saw that they had the forms of men and that they were naked and their bodies covered with hair. He stood, his limbs weak with terror, for he was sure that they were demons, but as they drew near, one of them shouted to him, "Do not be afraid, for we are men like yourself."

Malchus made the sign of the Cross, but still they came on. "If you are men," he asked them, fearfully, "why are you living among wild beasts?"

The one who had spoken before replied: "We were once monks in a great monastery, the monastery of Tabenna; but we both desired the life of solitude, so we left the monastery and wandered into the desert alone, and at length we came here. We have been here for forty years. I am an Egyptian and this brother is a Lybian." Then he began to question Malchus. "Tell me," he said, "how it goes with the children of men. Do they still build houses and ships? Do the ancient cities still stand and are their kings and governors still subject to the powers of evil? And what of the land we knew? Do the river waters still rise in flood once in the year?"

Malchus turned away with a sign of repulsion. "I cannot answer such questions, for I, too, have abandoned the world." Then he turned to the two creatures again, his eyes still fierce with suspicion. "How," he muttered, "can you be men? For if men were to remain here naked and without shelter, their bodies would be burned up by the summer sun and frozen to death by the winter cold."

"We are men indeed," answered the Egyptian, "though we graze the green herb with the beasts, and God has given to our naked bodies the power to endure both heat and cold."

Then those two human creatures turned from him to the nearest patch of herb, and there crouched upon their hands and knees and began to feed. And the great beasts that browsed about them accepted them as one of themselves and, moving forward as they cropped the herb, they inclosed them in their midst and Malchus saw them no more.

With a heavy sigh he resumed his way. "Here," he said to himself, "I have crossed the limit of the human world." But still he fled onward, for his despair drove him, and again he was a creeping thing upon the powdery floors of the desert, goaded daily by remorse, horror-stricken, and tortured nightly by the devils into whose power he had give himself, his body all the while blistered by the noonday fire, shaken by the chills of night, consumed by hunger and thirst and strange fevers. Throughout that time he trusted for his sustenance to what green herb he might find, for he would collect no food to carry with him, being determined to leave in God's hands whether he should live or die. And at last in a remoter desert of rock and sand he saw the dark mouth of a cave in the rock. He climbed up to it and looked inside, and when his eyes grew accustomed to the dimness he saw a man seated within with his back to the entrance. Malchus took up a stone and beat against the rock after the custom of the hermits, but the man did not move, and thinking that he might be at prayer or in a state of meditation, Malchus sat patiently outside, waiting till he should have finished. Yet after many hours the man had not moved, and when Malchus knocked again more loudly he took no notice.

But Malchus could not bring himself to depart. He was desperate, in his long loneliness, for the comfort of a human voice; even a short phrase, a human word or two, would be something to take back with him into the great void where the only voices were the voices of those embodiments of evil which tormented him by night. And so he entered the cave and laid his hands on the bowed shoulders of the seated man. Then, to his horror, the figure swayed, paused, and suddenly crumbled beneath the weight of his arms into a wreckage of bones and dry powder. The powdery dust stuck to his hands and steamed up into his nostrils, and he sprang back, sickened to the heart and, turning round, fled in horror from the cave.

Dust to dust. All about him now was dust and sand, the dried and crumbled residue of extinct life. For now he had reached the limit not only of humanity, but of life itself, and nothing was left for him but to parch and disintegrate with all else, a prey to the relentless heat and cold and the eternal restlessness of the winds. With a shudder of loathing he shook that gray human dust from his hands; but as he stared into the open palms the thought came to him, in the words of the aged holy man, that those hands of his would ere long decay and crumble into the same gray dust. Why, then, should he turn with loathing from what he himself was so soon to become? For whether the soul is destined for eternal bliss or eternal torment, dust is surely the destiny of the body. As he pondered those words, spoken by the soul to the hands, he remembered how they continued, "Before that hour of dissolution comes, stretch yourselves out in supplication to the Lord," and for the first time since his frenzied flight had begun he felt within him the desire and the courage to pray.

He was passing now by a solitary rock shaped like an altar, and it came into his mind that it had been set there as a sign that his prayer would be accepted. He approached it and knelt down before it. "O Saviour of mankind," he prayed, "guide me through this desolation to the place where I may at last find forgiveness." He remained long in prayer and when he rose he felt for the first time that a little core of light had begun to dawn in the blackness of his despair. Each day, after that, he prayed, and night by night the hauntings of the demons were diminished and he knew that the tyranny which the powers of evil had gained over him was abating. He felt now that he was under heavenly guidance as day after day he wandered on, heedless of the changes in the great monotony of sand that seemed boundless as the earth itself, until he began again to come upon the solitary cells of the hermits. Some were empty and ruinous, but in others he found the stern inhabitant who shared with him his scanty store of bread and water. The impulse to fly from himself which had first driven him out on his long pilgrimage, had spent itself, and he began to think that when he came to a suitable place he would stop there and build himself a cell in which, by a life of stern repentance, he might pursue that forgiveness for which he had prayed.

Chapter
Thirteen

When that thought had grown to a resolve, night had fallen. A full moon rising heavy and ripe out of the horizon was transforming the night into a pale and spectral day, and Malchus determined to travel on through the night and to choose for his abode the place where he should stop to rest an hour before dawn. And so he tramped on, and when it seemed that the night was flagging and dawn was not far off he halted on a ledge midway up a sandy slope and, nestling down into the deep, loose sand which still kept beneath the surface the warmth of the departed day, he fell asleep.

When he awoke, sunlight brooded heavy upon the world. His memory was confused and it seemed to him that this was no more than many of his awakenings in the unknown desert. Then the voice of his soul spoke as loud and clear as if an unseen speaker stood beside him. "Here is the place," it said, "in which you must seek forgiveness." And hearing those words, Malchus remembered that where he lay was the place in which he had resolved to remain. He rose up to survey it; but as he raised his eyes astonishment seized him, then horror and despair. Was it a hideous delusion, or had he been led during all these days not by Heaven but by demons? For, like a sudden and murderous onslaught, the discovery flashed upon him that he was standing before his own cell. And not only that, but, as he continued to glare dumbly at the familiar scene, he saw that a few yards away, small and slim in her straight gown, the cane-gatherer stood watching him. At that a frenzy came upon him and, snatching up stones in both hands, he rushed forward, hurling them at the girl and snatching up more and hurling again. But as he drew near to her her face became distorted and hideous and she dissolved before his eyes like a wraith; and Malchus stood poising a great stone in his right hand and staring foolishly on vacant air. He dropped the stone, but as he turned, with doubt and fear in his heart, toward his cell, he saw the girl come round the corner of it and—lovely again as when he had first seen her—vanish into the doorway. A shuddering came upon him like an ague, for now he understood that this was God's answer to his prayer that he might be guided to the place where he should find forgiveness. It was not by flying from his sin that he could overcome it, but by facing it. And now, in answer to his prayer, God had brought him face to face with the bodily symbol of his sin. He understood, but his courage sank before the ordeal; he felt that he was not yet strong enough to face the terrible and supreme struggle which involved the fate of his immortal soul. For, despite the long weeks of austerity in the inner-most desert, his mind was still troubled by earthly weaknesses and earthly desires: even after this long mortification of the flesh the desire of the flesh was still alive. How could he be sure, then, that he would have the strength to conquer? Could he stand firm against that girl, mortal or demon, waiting for him there in his cell? He stood trembling, for even this brief sight of her had aroused in him all his old half-conquered desire. If he were to fail again in the contest, how irrevocable this time would be his damnation. He braced himself and, raising his arms to Heaven, cried for mercy. "O Father," he prayed, "try not my weakness too sternly. Drive me not away from Thee." He took a few trembling steps toward the cell. Then he stopped. The odds were too terrible; his courage suddenly broke like a wall that collapses upon itself, and with hands thrust out before him like one groping in utter darkness, he turned his back on the cell and ran down the slope to the desert plain below.

He neither knew nor cared where he was going. He did not even know why he ran. As when Helena had cast him off, he felt that his life was broken in two. But now it was worse; for, to a man who is fleeing from God, no new hope, no saving ideal, can ever come. Henceforward he would be no more than a beast cast out from the herd, wandering lonely and disconsolate till death should bring deliverance. Worse, even worse, than that; for to him death would bring not deliverance, but inescapable and everlasting torment.

He had stopped running. His feeble body had of its own accord stood still, and, swaying like a tree in the wind, his head muffled in his cloak as if to shut out all existence, he tried to collect his thoughts. But his mind was dark and empty. A whirlwind of misery and despair filled its emptiness, and he stood, without a will, without thought, blind, stark as a desert rock, empty as a tomb.

Suddenly he started with fear. A touch had fallen upon his arm and a well-known voice sounded in his ears. "My son, I saw you in a vision as you were returning to yourself and I have brought you the money which I received in Alexandria for your weaving." A hand drew down his hand and put money into it. "It was told me in Alexandria that God has freed your father from the burden of the flesh. Give thanks to God, then, that he has given freedom to your father and has loosed from you another earthly bond."

Malchus stood immovable. He dared not lower the cloak from his face lest his eyes should meet the eyes of Serapion. A hand fell on his shoulder as if to comfort and exhort him, and in a little while Malchus felt that he was alone. Then only did he dare to lower his cloak. A hundred paces behind him a lonely figure retreated across the sand, and Malchus knew that he had cast off his only friend. He turned away with a sob and continued his aimless wandering; and, as he fared on, the storm of passion abated and he understood what Serapion had told him. At first the thought that his father was dead was no more to him than an echo out of the remote distance; it came to him as a surprise that his father should have been alive until so lately. But soon his dissolved life began to crystallize in new thoughts and emotions about this new thing and, as it were, to become coherent again. For, now that his father was dead, his mother would be alone, and he told himself that it was his duty to go to Alexandria to help her to settle her affairs. That thought became the center of his life; he fastened upon it as strayed birds of passage settle in flocks among the rigging of a ship, finding there for a moment foothold and repose in the homeless void of sea and sky. His life took on again a meaning and direction and he did not question whether it was truly love for his mother or the sight of a refuge for his own mind that urged him on. He knew only that his desires were fixed on returning to Alexandria.

And so he wandered on, not knowing where he was in the vast deformity of the desert; and late in the evening he found himself on the bank of the great river. Human shapes moved before him, and, following them, he went on board a boat which stood with loosely hanging sail at a wooden jetty. It seemed that it was about to cross the river and he stationed himself lonely and apart on the deck, as he had done long ago when he had followed Serapion on to the ship on Lake Mareotis.

The passage of the river did not take long, but when they touched the further bank it was already broad moonlight. The other passengers, having disembarked, settled themselves in the sand on the edge of the broad track which skirted the river. Malchus questioned one of them, who replied that they were waiting for a caravan which was traveling northward toward the towns and villages at the mouth of the river, and Malchus resolved at once that he too would join the caravan. He lay down in the sand not far from the other travelers, brushing away the upper layers with his hands till he came down to the warmth that lingered below, and soon, overcome with weariness, he fell into a deep sleep.

It seemed that he had only slept for a few minutes when some one shook him by the shoulder and he awoke to a hushed, multitudinous noise which seemed to fill the whole desert. It was the sound of hundreds of muffled footsteps churning the sand, the low muttering of a great company, the snuffling and breathing of camels, and the creaking of their harness and loads. The sky was cold and bright as polished steel. Malchus saw with amazement that it was not more than an hour from the dawn. He stood up, feeling stiff, weary, and very old. A great blur of shadowy forms moved against the clear sky and, like the distant rocks and hills of an unstable world, the fantastic shapes of camels swayed above them. The air was sharp and searching: he could see the breath of the camels smoking upward in a thin fume.

With the others who had crossed the river, he took his place in the rear of the shadowy host, and before they had marched an hour the dawn broke like a sudden summer on their right flank and their left was accompanied by a long saw-edged shadow like a mountain range that flowed and undulated in pace with them. Too soon upon the dawn came the torrid sunlight, burning up the morning coolness and adding another torment to each suffering life in the great sinuous retinue. As they went on their way, new companies joined them, and before long Malchus and his companions were no longer in the rear, but in the middle of the line of march. Noon came, burdening them with its relentless pressure, and Malchus, as in his lonely desert wanderings, fell into that monotonous rhythm of movement in which the body labors on wearily of its own accord and the mind is lulled into a stupor.

Suddenly a tremor ran through the company, a spasm of doubt, apprehension, then of sharp fear. Malchus thrilled to it with the rest and, seeing many heads turned eastward, he turned his eyes in that direction and saw a great cloud of dust that moved toward them like a sandstorm. He watched it keenly, anxiously, till it grew to a company of white-cloaked riders. Rapidly they came nearer and nearer still. They were Arabs. Perched on their long-legged camels, they crouched eagerly forward. Their long cloaks streamed behind them. Soon they were so close that if they had been going to cross the course of the caravan they would have swung to the right or left; but still they swept on, straight for the center. Then suddenly the caravan broke into three. The van detached itself from the rest and flew cowering forward; the rear turned and shrank backward on its tracks. A small company in the middle, which included Malchus and his companions and a dozen laden camels, halted, terrified and bewildered by its sudden isolation. The white-cloaked riders swept round them in a circle and closed in upon them.

Malchus awaited the outcome like one in a trance. Was this, he wondered numbly, God's retribution for his cowardly flight from the ordeal appointed by Him? Without hope and without fear he watched some of the Arabs dismount and move among the captured company, carrying drawn swords in their hands. Soon an Arab approached him also, and he was led away to where four camels lay waiting. The small heads with their great eyes and haughty muzzles moved, scornfully inquisitive, on the top of the long bird-like necks. The Arab stopped before the first and signed to Malchus to mount. A figure wrapped in a black cloak was already in the saddle. Malchus climbed up behind it. The figure did not stir, and Malchus, too, neither stirred nor spoke, waiting idly for what should happen.

When all the prisoners were mounted and a party of Arabs had taken charge of the captured camels, one of the Arabs came up and beat up the four grumbling beasts and the company began to move. The van and the rear of the caravan, which had fled forward and backward, were no longer in sight. They had vanished among the rocks and sandhills.

Malchus, looking for the sun, saw that they were now traveling due east. At first they moved slowly, but soon the leaders broke into a canter and Malchus and his unknown companion were flung against each other. The violent swaying began to give him great pain, and, seeing that his companion was also distressed, Malchus put his arms about him that they might steady each other. Thus bound together, they were able to avoid the swaying and buffeting which had tormented them and endangered their safety when apart. The thought of Alexandria, which, when he had joined the caravan, had grown for Malchus into something beautifully and terribly real, had shrunk back now into a dream. Perhaps he would never go there now, and his mind effortlessly began to picture the city—the streets, his parents' house, his own house, and that little door, so piercingly familiar, which opened into Helena's garden. He paused at the door, hesitated; something—he could not remember what—held him forcibly back, but he shook off the restraint and opened the door. He went in quickly and secretly, shutting the door behind him, and stood breathless at the beauty of the place, at the gentle stirring chequer of sunlight and leaf shadows, the flowers drooping in clusters from the trees and swelling in mounds of blended colors from the grass, the fountains—silver ghosts half-seen among the trees—filling the place with the cooling rustle of water. He ventured forward upon a grassy walk, but figures moved among the trees and he hid himself till they had passed. "Where is she?" he asked himself with ecstatic fear, and just as he was going to move again he saw that Helena was watching him through the boughs. She came toward him, her eyes shining with pleasure, and he stood waiting. A voice called him loudly and commandingly from the garden gate. He trembled, for he knew that it was the voice of God; but he lingered like a disobedient child and Helena caught him by the shoulders. Then, submitting wilfully to his desire as he had done when the cane-gatherer came to his cell, he threw his arms around Helena, whispering into her ear little passionate phrases, deliciously aware of the smallness and suppleness of the body in his arms. Then a startling rush of wind in his ears and a gust of sand in his face, and he awoke to the flowerless desert and the weary lurching of the camel. But still he was no more than half awake; still his mind thrilled to the sweetness of his meeting with Helena, his arms still felt that soft weight of her body. Though a man is not responsible before God for his dreams, was it not deadly sin to take delight in the memory of them? But this was more than a memory. He still held the soft body in his arms. He cried out in fear and the cry roused him from his drowsiness. The body that he clasped was the body of his fellow captive. He shuddered and loosed his grasp, as if what he clasped were a thing unclean. But at his cry and the loosing of his arms his companion turned, and at the same moment another gust of wind blew the cloak from the muffled face. Malchus saw with horror and despair that the face looking at him was the face of a woman.

Was she an evil spirit in human form? Or was it that God had rescued him from his cowardly flight and his desperate attempt to return to Alexandria, and brought him again, with an inexorable indulgence, face to face with his sin? Malchus did not know; but he knew that he was in dire jeopardy and he prayed from his heart, making the holy sign at the end of each prayer. And still, despite his prayers, the woman remained on the saddle in front of him, so that he knew she was no demon, but a creature of flesh and blood like himself. The speed of their going had slackened to a walk, but now again the leaders of the company urged on the lurching beasts and again Malchus and his companion clung together for safety. And Malchus cried to the soul within him: "O my soul, such is the outcome of your attempt to escape the judgment of God and return to the life which you had cast off."

Chapter
Fourteen

Late in the evening of the second day, when the sky was already curdling into darkness and those sharp points of brightness which are called the stars, they halted. They had reached the Arab encampment. A dark cluster of tents showed square and angular on the gray plain and the air was full of the mournful bleating of the flocks which had been brought in from pasture. Then the same Arab came and made their camel kneel down, and Malchus and the woman stepped stiffly into the sand and lay down apart to rest in the place appointed for them.

Soon after the dawn Malchus awoke. A tall figure stood beside him, who ordered him to rise up and follow him. It was the sheikh of the company who had captured them, and he led Malchus toward the largest of the tents and, lifting the curtain of the doorway, took him inside. A woman crouched on the floor, preparing food. The sheikh told Malchus that this was his mistress whom he must obey, and Malchus, being defenseless, bowed himself down before the Arab woman. Then food of curdled camel's milk was given to him for himself and the woman who had ridden with him, and he returned to the place where he had slept. Of the rest of the captives he saw nothing, and, being alone with the woman among a strange people, Malchus was forced to converse with her daily, to the peril of his soul. But he did not allow his eyes to fall upon her, for he had seen that she was young and beautiful. Her name was Veronica. She was a married woman of his own race. Her husband's house was in Lycopolis, and when she had fallen into the hands of the Arabs she had been traveling to Alexandria; but of her life and circumstances Malchus knew no more, since he forbore to question her or to talk with her more than was needful. She herself spoke no more than he, but when she did so the soft low note of her voice thrilled him, for it was too like the voice of Helena—so like that, whenever she spoke, old memories and old delights woke again in his heart and dreams of Helena troubled his nightly sleep.

After a few days the sheikh led Malchus out and set him in charge of their flock in place of the Arab shepherd who was so old that he could scarcely drag his parched and wearied body as far as the meager pastures where the beasts found a daily sustenance. For two days the old shepherd accompanied Malchus, showing him where the sparse herb sprang among the rocks and thorns, and in the evening when they had returned to the tents he sat with Malchus, teaching him the names of the sheep and goats. Each had its own name and each when called would raise its head and come to the call. The Arabs scorn the shepherd's lot, preferring the monotonous idleness of the camp to the free and open life of the herdsman, and none of them will undertake it except from bare necessity.

But the freedom and peace of the shepherd's life comforted Malchus. He rose with the dawn and led forth the flock, and when they had reached the pasture land the beasts browsed slowly forward till near upon noon, when he called them in to shelter from the torrid heat in the shadows of the rocks or thickets. There he milked a goat or sheep for his midday meal and, having drunk, stretched himself full length in the shade while the sheep stood together with hanging heads and the goats drew apart and lay down to rest. Then, when the breathless urgence of the noon was past, Malchus called them out to pasture again till sunset, when he led them back to the encampment, where the women were waiting to milk the ewes and female goats. Each beast knew the woman that milked it and went of its own accord to the accustomed tent. With the darkness the herd lay down to rest where the horses and camels were gathered about the tents, and the sheep dogs mounted guard through the night, prowling to and fro with frequent snarling and barking. Sometimes a wolf came out of the rocky hills, and at his approach the flock would suddenly shrink together in a panic and the dogs set up a loud baying. Then the shepherd with beating heart leaped up and raised a clamor to drive off the thief; but often, when the night was moonless, a small, agonized bleating was heard in the darkness and, when the light returned, the flock was the less by a lamb. When no green herb remained within a short distance of the camp, Malchus had to lead the flock further afield, and sometimes for many days together they were out in the open desert, since it was too far to return to camp each night. At such times the sheikh used to ride out once in two or three days to see that all was well with the flock.

Malchus was glad of this peaceful occupation. All day he had the solitude that he desired and he was dependent upon no man, for by his labor as shepherd he earned the milk which he drew from the flock for his sustenance. In that high desert country the air was pure and sweet and, except during the burning noon-tide hours, the sun was less fierce than in the lower deserts he had known. His body, under the daily exercise and the healthy diet of milk, grew firm and strong and his sleep was the deep sleep of honest weariness. No visions, good or evil, came to him there. That grim battle ground of the spirit in which he had lived so long, where the difficult pursuit of holiness and the endless struggle against evil were alike an unceasing torment and all earthly things were but the outward manifestation of striving spiritual forces, seemed now a country remote as the moon. He had been carried, it seemed, into a peaceful limbo where all was simple and kindly, and he loved the innocent beasts that answered his call and intrusted themselves to his guidance. Only two things marred his life's serenity—the knowledge that he had failed before the great ordeal of the spirit and had basely withdrawn from God the life he had dedicated to Him, and the unappeasable desire of love which flamed up, still undiminished, in dreams of Helena and the abiding memory of the cane-gatherer which lived on in his mind unexorcised by all his agonies of repentance and prayer. The presence of his fellow captive, Veronica, also disturbed him, and made those unbidden memories more real and vivid than before. But alone in the high desert with his flock he had many days of peace in which it seemed to him that he was not altogether excluded from the mercy of God, and as he led them from patch to patch of the sparse herb or, unsheathing the sword which he carried to guard them against wolves, set himself to cut a bundle of dry thorns for his lonely camp fire, he prayed to God from a full heart for final deliverance.

Yet in other moods, the fear came upon him that the untroubled quiet of his life was not the peace of forgiveness, but the silence of utter exclusion. Perhaps he was no longer tormented by evil spirits or visited by comforting visions because the battle was over and lost and Satan waited, secure of his prey, for the moment of his death. Then horror came upon him and he lay on his face in the dust in the agony of desperation. But those despairing moods were less frequent than the other moods of serenity in which it seemed to him that his life as a shepherd was a blessed respite from the tempestuous life of hermit.

But one evening the sheikh called him to his tent. To reward him for his honest service, he told Malchus, he was resolved to give him the woman Veronica as his wife. "For every man," he said, "has need of a woman to ease his loneliness and to pitch his tent and serve his food." Malchus thrust out protesting hands, declaring that he was a monk and might not marry, and the woman, besides, was married already. But, hearing his generosity scorned, the sheikh's face grew dark with anger and he drew his sword and would have killed Malchus if he had not run for refuge to his mistress, the sheikh's wife, and grasped her hand. Perforce he resigned himself to the sheikh's will and, hearing that he submitted, the sheikh was appeased and a tent was set apart for Malchus and Veronica and they were married after the manner of the Arabs.

But when at the end of the day they had been brought together into the tent and left alone, Malchus turned his face from Veronica and crouched in a corner of the tent. He believed now that the Arabs had been sent to capture him only that his damnation might be the more certain. He was being inescapably drawn to commit once more the sin which had imperiled his immortal soul. But as this thought grew to terrible certainty in his mind it brought with it another—the thought that it was surely Satan, and not God, who had led him back through the wilderness to his cell and shown him the cane-gatherer waiting for him. His sin, indeed, was unforgivable, God had abandoned him from the moment he had committed it. He knew now that all hope was past. The bitterness of death entered into his soul and with a choking sob he bowed his head to the dust. But one thing, at least, he could do, one act to bear witness before God that his soul still desired chastity. Rising from the ground, he drew his sword from its scabbard and turned the point to his heart.

But in the little moonlight that pierced the darkness of the tent the woman saw the gleam of the sword and cried out. The sword slipped from his trembling hands.

"What are you doing?" she cried.

"Do not be afraid," answered Malchus. "I will not harm you."

But Veronica was groping toward him in the dark. She set her foot on the fallen sword. "Tell me," she whispered, "what you were going to do."

No reply came from the motionless figure half seen in the darkness before her. She spoke again:

"Swear to me by Jesus Christ that you will not kill yourself because of me. Rather, if such is your wish, turn your sword against me, for I am as anxious as you to preserve my chastity. I fled even from my lawful husband for the sake of Christ, and when the Arabs captured me I was on my way with the holy woman, Melania, to enter the White Convent which is outside the walls of Alexandria. May we not, then, live together in chastity, loving one another with a spiritual love? I will cover up my face and speak to you only when necessity compels. So we shall escape the sheikh's displeasure, for he will never know that we are not in truth husband and wife."

When Malchus heard these words and perceived the mercy of God, he knelt down in the tent and offered up thanks to Him who is the sinner's salvation. Veronica also prayed in a corner of the tent apart, and when they had made an end they lay down to sleep, for at dawn Malchus would have to go far out into the desert with the flock and Veronica would follow him, leading the ass on which they would load their tent and a few household utensils. In those days the herb was becoming rare and they had to seek it so far afield that the shepherd and his flock were often a whole month away from the Arab camp. But at intervals of three or four days the sheikh, as was his custom, rode out to see that all was well, and, perceiving that Malchus took good care of the flock, he was content.

For many weeks Malchus and Veronica lived together chastely in the sandy solitudes, sharing their single tent and eating together; and although they seldom spoke and Malchus never saw her face, yet he knew that a kindness toward her was growing up in his heart, and, imagining the face that he could not see, he had come to imagine it always as the face of Helena. So day by day, as he sat lonely among the high rocks and tended the grazing beasts, or lay drowsing at noon in the shadow of some great stone or thorn bush, or watched nightly with the prowling sheep dogs under stars which seemed every moment about to shower down in their bright millions on to the dim gray desert, his heart began more and more to turn back with longing toward his cell.

Then his mind grew fruitful with schemes. The sheikh, secure in his confidence in Malchus, never visited them now more often than once in four days, and Malchus began to see that it might be possible for him and Veronica to escape. He knew where the river lay. From the rocky heights above their present grazing-grounds he had seen its thin silvery scroll gleaming far to the west. If they could carry enough food and water for six days they might be able to reach the river and find there a boat or some northward-moving caravan.

One evening, when Veronica had finished milking the ewes, Malchus, returning to their tent, found her in tears. Her trouble was so great that she was unable to disguise it and she sat with her face bowed in her hands, her shoulders shaken by sobs. At first, when Malchus questioned her, she could not speak, but before long she had gained control of herself. "I think," she sobbed, "that we shall be captives until our death, and when I reflect that I shall never enter the holy life for which I have left my husband and my home, despair comes upon me, for it seems that God has not found worthy the life I have offered to him."

Then, for the first time, Malchus spoke to her of his schemes. "But for wanderers in the desert," he said, "there waits hunger and parching thirst and infinite weariness of the body. Would you risk these things, and worse, for the bare chance of escape?"

"I would gladly risk death itself," she said; and seeing her so ready, Malchus began to build up a plan.

"We must wait till the moon is almost at the full, and we must wait, too, for a day when the sheikh comes to visit us so that we may have all the interval between that visit and his next before our flight is discovered. It will be a long journey, four days at the least, and, if we wander a little out of our direction, perhaps six or seven. And I must set about preparing food for the journey and water skins in which to carry water, so that we shall not have to linger on the way, seeking for these things, for water and green herbs may be very scarce in the part of the desert that we must cross."

During the days that followed, Malchus killed two kids and dried their flesh for food, and from their skins he made water skins. It was the shepherd's duty every second day to lead his flock to one of the desert pools, for sheep must drink at least once in two days, and next time he led them to the water Malchus took the skins and brought them back filled. The moon was already waxing toward the full and, everything being ready, Malchus and Veronica waited anxiously for the sheikh's visit.

He came, late one afternoon, cantering on his long-tailed mare, with two companions. He began at once, as they had feared, to count over the flock, and soon noticed that two kids were missing. When Malchus told him that they had died, his face darkened and they waited with stopped breath for what he would do. But next moment it seemed that he accepted Malchus's tale, for his face cleared and he spoke of other matters, and soon he and his two companions mounted and rode away.

Malchus and Veronica stood watching them as they grew smaller and smaller and then vanished over the last visible wave of the desert with bowed heads and cloaks filled out with the wind of their speed.

Chapter
Fifteen

Then they began with feverish haste to prepare for flight. First they dug out of the sand the kids' flesh and water skins which they had buried to hide them from the sheikh, and then, leaving their tent standing, they led the flock to the nearest pool, because Malchus could not bring himself to desert the innocent beasts where they would perish of thirst.

When the light had almost gone and the flock had lain down about the pool, they loaded the flesh and the two water skins on their shoulders and struck out into the void. For a while the dead ashes of the sunset guided them; then suddenly the heaven was full of stars, waking depth beneath depth in glittering shoals, and when they had marched a little above an hour the orange disk of the moon rose out of the ghostly sands and the whole desert glimmered white and visionary under the paling and brightening moonlight. They fled on in haste, not daring for more than a few minutes and at rare intervals to throw down their burdens and ease their aching shoulders. Crest beyond crest and trough beyond trough, the desert dropped downward beneath their stumbling feet and the uplands they had left grew up higher and higher behind them, lines of black ramparts against a luminous heaven. Dawn found them faint with weariness on a rock-strewn waste between two crests. For two hours still they labored on, till Veronica stumbled and fell and could not rise. Then they ate a little of the flesh and drank some water and laid themselves down to sleep a little in the shadows of the rocks.

But it was not long before their fears awoke them, and soon they were hastening on again until burning noon, brooding breathless upon the fiery sand, drove them to seek the shadow. And now their failing bodies, grown careless, in their dire exhaustion, of peril and death, claimed the repose without which they could no longer endure the labors demanded of them. They slept till the noonday ardor was long spent; then, waking with renewed energy and renewed fear, they plunged on through the hot and clogging sand, turning their heads sometimes as they hurried onward, to scan the horizon behind them. But the horizon was bare and all the great spaces they had traversed empty of life, and moonrise saw them plodding painfully toward the ever-receding crest of a vast undulation in the sand, beyond which opened the star-hung emptiness of night. In all their journey they spoke hardly at all; all their strength and all their breath were needed to carry them on. But without the help of words, fellowship and sympathy were strong between them, born of the fears and hardships they had shared. Sometimes Malchus, reminding himself that his companion was but a woman, would urge Veronica to take more rest and food, but Veronica bore up with an energy equal to his own and for him the steadfastness of body and soul in this small woman was a thing for wonder and admiration.

It was in the morning of the fourth day that, as Malchus turned to stare backward on their tracks, two shapes rose suddenly upon the sky line. In a moment they had dropped downward from the blue and were descending the pallid gold of the desert. They were camel-drivers. Malchus said nothing of it to Veronica, but his eyes anxiously scanned the country that lay about them. They were rounding the slow curve of a hillside. On their left the desert fell away to a wide, empty hollow; on the right, not far above them, it heaved itself against the sky in a rampart of broken rocks. Malchus led the way upward. Their only hope was to find some cleft or hollow in the rocks. He shot a glance backward. The riders had disappeared, but he could see their tracks, scrawled in a long curve down the slope to where a nearer crest hid them, and Malchus's trembling imagination pictured them scouring the intervening hollow and mounting faster and faster to the new crest on which, at any moment, they would appear, terrifyingly enlarged. The knowledge that in that silence and emptiness a secret death was rushing toward them, the sense of a headlong pursuit about to burst upon them when and where he did not know, but terribly soon and terribly near, gripped his heart in a hand of ice. He threw his arm about the laboring Veronica, urging her up the rising ground toward the rocks. Then, high above them, a great ragged disk of black shadow appeared among the rocks and Malchus knew that God, who is the Help of the helpless and the Hope of the hopeless had opened a cavern for them in the cliff. They climbed desperately toward it, gripping the sheer rocks with their hands, and flung themselves within. Shrunk together into a dark corner, they huddled breathless, listening while it seemed to each of them that the loud beating of their hearts filled the whole cavern with dull vibrations. Then, crouching there they grew aware that they were not alone in the cave. Some other living thing was near them; the air was thick with the rank, tawny smell of a wild beast. But in their dire extremity they had no fear for any beast, for all their fear was fastened upon their pursuers, who at any moment would break in upon them. "If it please God," whispered Malchus, "this cave shall be our salvation; but if He forsake us, at least it will receive our dead bodies."

Suddenly the golden mouth of the cave was blurred with shadow. A man holding a drawn sword in his hand stood in the sunlight, so close that, leaning forward, they might have touched him. They held their breath, immovable as stone. Then the man, who, because his eyes were unaccustomed to the darkness of the cave, could see nothing, shouted into the echoing mouth. "Come out, you runaway slaves," he cried. "Your master is waiting for you below."

But as he shouted, something stirred in the darkness at the other side of the cave and a great beast sprang at the man and hurled him to the ground. His sword leaped from his loosened grasp and clanged upon the rocky floor. Staring into the bright mouth of the cave, they saw that the beast was a lioness. She stood for a moment with her forepaws and her great head planted upon the prostrate body; then slowly she dragged it into the cave where her cubs waited. From the man there came not a sound, but they could hear the hot breathing of the beast like a wind throttled in a cleft of the rocks.

For a long while all was still. Then again a shadow troubled the brightness of the cave's mouth; the shadow of a great arm swept suddenly across the sunlit wall, and the voice of the sheikh, their master, rang through the vault. Waiting below, he had become impatient when his companion did not return with the captives, and now he had come himself in great wrath. "Ho, Zogreb!" he shouted, and the well-known voice struck terror to their hearts. "Bring them out. Why do you delay?"

With his sword raised he took three paces into the cave. But again the lioness sprang like a tree-trunk hurled from a catapult, and the sheikh went down before her as his servant had done. His last agonized cry filled the cavern with the very voice of horror, and then there was silence but for the dragging of the heavy corpse along the floor.

Then Malchus and Veronica rose up and went forth from the cave, and, climbing down the rocks, they saw two camels picketed below. Then both fell upon their faces and offered up thanks to Him who is the Help of the helpless and the Hope of the hopeless, who had sent the lioness to deliver them from their oppressor and had given them the two camels to carry them back into freedom. And when they had eaten and drunk of the store of provisions which they found upon the camels, they loosed the picket ropes and mounted, and an hour before sunset of the same day they came to the banks of the Nile.

They followed the river, and as darkness fell they reached a town where a north-bound ship was taking cargo for Alexandria. It was even then almost ready to cast off. Malchus and Veronica made haste to unload the camels, and while Veronica sat guarding the loads on the wharf, Malchus led away the camels and sold them to provide money for their passage. And within the hour they lay on the deck and the great sail yawned above them in the feeble breeze, and above the sail, above all their world of sand and rock and water, yawned the profound blue of the night filled to its uttermost recesses with luminous galaxies which showered their images on the black crystal of the river gliding endlessly northward. They lay motionless: a great peace had fallen upon them. It seemed that their lives, having rushed down through a great turmoil of fears, agonies, and despairs, had suddenly swung to rest in a dark, quiet pool. And in Malchus's mind so great was the peace that he had ceased to look forward into the future.

It was Veronica's voice that recalled it to him. "Do for me now one thing more, my brother," she said. "Lead me to the White Convent without the walls of Alexandria. There we will bid each other farewell and you will be free."

The words fell like a dirge upon his ears. How calmly Veronica spoke of their parting. He himself had forgotten that they were to part. The terrible adventures and hardships of their long flight had, for him, drawn them together by a hundred bonds of sympathy. Day by day he had seen the great spirit shining in the small, calm face and carrying the small body through ordeals that even a strong man might fear to face, and his own spirit had bowed in reverence before her nobility. Now, remembering that in a few days he was to bid her farewell, his soul shrank within him at the thought of the separation. It was as if the noblest part of himself was to be cut away from him. And during the long, calm days of the voyage he sat silent and unmoving beside her while the endless golden hills, the long lines of emerald palm grove and the broken temples and monstrous sculptured gods of a race long dead glided past them and were lost in the all-devouring distance. And it seemed to him, as he watched that endless flux and dissolution, that all the human things of his own world—the love, the beauty, the swift adventure—were being slowly but irrevocably withdrawn from him, leaving him cold, stripped, and solitary, a shape of rock exposed to the warring tempests of heaven and hell till it should be weathered down to a handful of pure gold or a heap of restless sand. At night, when he slept, his dreams turned always to Helena. In every dream now she was in danger or captivity, calling to him to save her, to take her back to him. Her voice came to him small and faint from behind closed doors, out of thick darkness, across impenetrable forests. Sometimes for a brief moment she stood before him, close and vivid; but as his heart warmed into final happiness she faded from his sight with an unfinished appeal on her lips. Sometimes he dreamed of one of his earlier loves and sometimes, too, of Veronica, but always at the end of the dream the face, or body, or voice resolved itself into Helena, as though Helena were for him the essence and symbol of all womanhood.

Chapter
Sixteen

Malchus sat outside the closed gate of the White Convent. He had faithfully led Veronica to her destination; an hour ago she had entered the gate and with the closing of the gate behind her she had left the world forever. She had approached the convent as a lover approaching her beloved, and as she bade farewell to Malchus and his eyes fell upon her for the last time her face shone with the ecstatic gladness of a saint entering Paradise. Yet, though that moment was also the moment of his own freedom, Malchus felt none of her gladness. He felt only homeless and abandoned; it was as though his heart were dying within him. He found comfort only in the thought of Alexandria, whose walls and towers showed a mile to the east above the greenery of a vineyard. There, it seemed to him, Helena waited to give him that peace which he had sought so long. Kneeling beside the convent wall, he prayed desperately for guidance, but still his thoughts and desires drew him to Alexandria so strongly and so insistently that at last he came to believe that, for some hidden reason, it was God's will that he should enter the city. He delayed, perplexed and timid, till he fell asleep, seated there in the gray dust under the convent wall.

When he woke his soul was trembling like a harp string at the touch of a half-forgotten dream. Some heavenly vision had come to him and gone again, leaving a trouble like the echo of incomprehensible words. Then, as he groped for the meaning of the vision, the words took on clearness and sense. "Go into Alexandria," they seemed to say, "and follow your desires, for thus you shall find your peace."

That, it seemed, was the only answer to his prayer. He rose and, with slow and doubtful steps, began to make his way toward the city, and at sunset he entered the court of Diocles the poet and stood by the little fountain which leaped from a fringe of tall blue irises, while the slave went to announce his name. He had not waited for more than a minute when a quick step sounded in the portico and Diocles, with the familiar movement of his wide shoulders, came hurrying forward with outstretched hands.

"My dear Malchus!" he cried in his deep, ringing voice, laying his two hands on Malchus's shoulders. "At last you have returned after all this time. And you left us without a word ... without a hint, how many years ago?"

"A lifetime, for me, Diocles!" Malchus replied, gazing at his friend as at some incredible vision.

"Yes, a lifetime indeed, my friend; for you are changed beyond belief."

Malchus did not reply, for he realized now for the first time the full magnitude of the change which had come over him. For Diocles was not changed; he was the same as when Malchus had last seen him, but it seemed to him that he himself was beholding his friend and the familiar house across a gulf wide as the grave, for the man and the place, so familiar to his sight, were strange, immeasurably strange, to his mind and soul. He felt that he had dropped back suddenly into a life whose language he had forgotten and he could do nothing but gaze at Diocles in speechless bewilderment. Diocles saw his distress and, throwing his arm about Malchus's shoulder, led him into the house.

"Come, my friend," he said, "you are exhausted. The slaves shall take you to the bath and I will seek you out some fresher and more comfortable clothes than those you are wearing at present. When you are bathed and rested you shall tell me your adventures, which, I am sure, must have been of the strangest." Diocles clapped his hands and the slaves came and led Malchus to the bath.

But the slaves, as they bathed the parched body and anointed it with unguents, gazed at Malchus in astonishment, for, overcome by the waking of a hundred memories, his dazed mind had sunk into a stupor and it seemed to them that the nerveless body and limbs that they handled were the body and limbs of a puppet.

When he was bathed and dressed, one of the slaves led him to the portico where Diocles reclined, waiting for him. The poet rose at his approach and led him to a couch beside his own. "Lie here, my dear Malchus," he said, "and rest. You are still, I think, too tired to talk. Try to sleep for a while. I will give orders that no one is to be admitted."

Malchus lay down without a word; then, looking up at his friend, his eyes kindled for a moment to something of their old intensity.

"Tell me," he asked, "before I sleep, of Helena."

"Still of Helena, my poor Malchus? But what can I tell you? Helena has gone. Months ago she left us almost as suddenly as you did. She had been ill for a while and suddenly one day we heard that her villa was closed and she had gone abroad—to Constantinople, it was said. The villa is closed still and nobody can tell us whether or not she will ever return."

Malchus made no reply, but Diocles, looking into the worn face of his friend, saw the lips turn gray and a look of deeper suffering contract the wrinkled flesh about the eyes, and as he laid his head back upon the pillow he turned away his face like a dying man.

For many days Malchus stayed on, a lonely stranger, in the house of Diocles. When friends, some of whom had been his friends, visited Diocles, he avoided them, for he could no longer talk to them. Their fluent, cultured talk had lost all meaning for him, and he sat silent among them, his eyes like the eyes of a wild creature that has been trapped in a cage. Diocles saw that some devastating experience had transformed his friend and was careful to guard him from all annoyance. In time, he hoped, Malchus would recover something of his old self. And sometimes, indeed, it seemed that he was awaking from his stupor, for by degrees, when he and Diocles were alone, he began to break silence. He spoke always of the past, of his old life in Alexandria; but his talk was always vague and hesitating and he questioned Diocles often, as though he were blindly seeking for some clue in events which he himself had half forgotten. It was as though he were recovering from a long and severe illness.

One day he dared at last to walk out into the city. He went alone, walking slowly and shrinkingly, keeping close to the walls like a man who fears an ambush. And indeed he had cause to fear, for on all sides from streets and squares and porches the ambushed memories arose like strong perfumes from flowers, till the present reality about him was confused and darkened by the stronger and more tyrannous reality of the past, searching out and delicately torturing the hidden nerves of spirit and sense. As he gazed about him he knew that he had lost that awareness of place and time, of the here and the now, by which a man is able to relate himself to his temporal surroundings. His spirit had strayed, it seemed, into some interspace between past and present, his old life in Alexandria, his present ghost-like haunting of those old scenes, and the remote, holy, and terrible life of the desert; for all of these diverse lives were present to him and all were equally real or unreal.

Such was the mood in which he wandered through the city. Soon he found himself standing at the door of Helena's garden. His instinct had led him there. But now another instinct—the instinct of the hermit who had fled from the cane-gatherer and shrunk away from the presence of Veronica—tightened his muscles in a spasm of revulsion, and with clenched fists and suddenly indrawn breath he drew back from the door. He was on the point of hastening away, when those words which had come to him in the dream struck again upon his sense so clearly that it seemed that some invisible presence had spoken them in his ear. "Go into the city and follow your desires, for thus shall you find your peace." But to what purpose had his desires led him to the house where Helena was no more? Even if he should try to enter the deserted garden, he would surely find this door barred against him. The very door looked deserted; it was weather-worn and caked with dust, and the weeds encumbered the threshold. He stood irresolutely gazing at it. Then, obeying an idle impulse, he stretched out his hand and laid it on the latch.

To his surprise, the door opened. He went in and closed it quickly behind him.

The garden was beautiful in its abandonment; the paths that had been so faultless in the old days were covered with weeds; the grass of the lawns, formerly short and smooth as the fur of a squirrel, stood a foot high, and the flowers had broken bounds and changed the place into a jungle rich with a hundred odors and colors. Its beauty soothed the heart which ached for its desolation.

Walking slowly and softly like one who enters a holy place, Malchus made his way toward the house. He came upon it round a tall grove of rose-laurels, thick with blossom. Like the little door and the garden, it was desolate. He stood like one in a trance, gazing with incredulous eyes. It faced him blindly. He felt that he was looking into a dead and eyeless face which till now had always shone for him with a thousand welcomes. Still, as if attracted by the misery of it, he walked on and stood by the tall porch. Suddenly his heart leaped. Rapid footsteps were approaching him. He turned. An old man stood before him. Malchus knew him—he was Helena's house steward.

"What are you doing here?" the old man asked. There was both fear and challenge in his voice.

"You do not recognize me, Ammon," Malchus answered him. "I am Malchus, the son of Sempronius. I have been away for a long while and, finding the garden door open just now, I entered. Let me come in and look round the house too, and then I will depart."

"I am sorry, sir, but you cannot enter."

"But why? Surely..."

"My mistress gave strict orders, sir."

"Yes, against inquisitive strangers, Ammon; but an old friend.... Come, let me go in." Malchus was about to enter when the old man seized him by the cloak.

"Stop, sir! Stop! Let me explain." Malchus turned impatiently and saw that the old man was trembling. The sight of his trouble roused a sudden, enthralling doubt in Malchus's mind, and his persistence became the more stubborn.

"You know me, my friend," he said. "Why make all this trouble? I am not a thief."

"I implore you, sir, to go away. The gate should not have been left open. It was all my fault, and the consequences..."

"That is soon remedied, Ammon; and, as it happens, no harm has come of it." Malchus, too, was trembling now. The old man stood wringing his hands.

"Do not speak so loud, sir. Let me explain, since you will not go; but promise me on your honor that you will not reveal what I tell you."

"I promise."

"My mistress is still here."

Malchus gasped and clutched the old man's shoulder. "Here? In the house?"

"Yes, sir."

"I must see her."

"You cannot, sir. She has given strict orders that not even her dearest friends are to know that she is here."

But Malchus had forgotten the old man. The beating of his heart was stifling him and, flinging out his arms, he rushed past Ammon into the house.

It echoed to his footsteps like an empty tomb as he hastened from chamber to chamber. Each was empty till he came to the small inner chamber which had been Helena's private sitting room. As he entered it, two slaves rose quickly from their watch beside a couch and hurried toward him with hands raised to bar his approach. Malchus could see that on the couch behind them some one lay motionless.

When he did not stop, each of the slaves seized one of his arms and with a strength born of his frenzy he dragged them with him toward the couch.

The face that stared blindly at him from the couch was not the face of Helena. As he staggered back in horror it seemed to him at first that the heavy, leonine mask foully discolored with brown blotches was not a human face at all. Yet the shape of the linen-covered body was human, and he saw, with a shudder, that a naked human arm, horribly thickened and corroded, lay across the breast.

He turned away his face. His eyes met those of Ammon, who had followed him. "Take me to your mistress," he pleaded in a broken voice.

The old man nodded toward the couch.

Malchus covered his face with his hands. "No!" he moaned. "No! Such things are not possible."

Then a harsh, stertorous voice was heard in the room. "Who is it?" the voice asked.

A silence, filled by the thick breathing of the leper, followed the question.

"Ammon," the voice began again, "answer immediately. Who is this stranger?"

Malchus turned and fell on his knees, but with eyes averted from the couch. "It is I, Helena—Malchus. I have come back."

Again there was silence. Then the reply came:

"Go away. I do not know you. Ammon, order the slaves to drive him out with whips."

But Ammon and the slaves stood motionless beside the couch, and Malchus, with a cry like the snapping of a cord, fled from the room and ran stumbling through the garden till he fell headlong in the long grass.

Chapter
Seventeen

So Malchus found his cure. When he came to himself the sun was low. A coolness breathed through the trees and the long grass in which he lay. It seemed to him that he had awakened out of a long fever. His mind was clear and cool like the garden about him. A bond within him had snapped, as at birth the bond is severed that binds the child to the mother. The past had broken from him and plunged away like an avalanche into the depths far beneath him, leaving him high and lonely like a single granite rock which has escaped the crash; and as he stood up in the grass he knew that he was cured of the long distemperature of earthly love.

He stood waiting. Soon the sun would set. But as he waited, the light grew and soon the garden was filled with the pure essence of early sunlight. The sunset and the hours of darkness had passed over him as he lay in the grass, and already the new day had risen. Without hesitation he made his way to the garden door and, closing it behind him, turned his steps, as he had done once before, toward Lake Mareotis. Soon he had left the city and threaded the long vineyards, and now he stood on the wharf at the edge of the lake. A ship was waiting and, going on board, he sat down and covered his head with his cloak. It was as if time had rolled back and a part of his life were repeating itself. But this time he followed no one, for he needed no guide or support, being sufficient to himself. Out in the desert his trial awaited him, but now he went forward in confidence, desiring only his cell which faced the east high on its sandy hill, for there, he knew, he would find his salvation.

[Transcriber's note: Odd and unusual spellings are as printed.]

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Table of Contents

- DESERT
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE