Chapter II: Part 2

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."