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.
[Illustration: woodcut]
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.
[Illustration: woodcut]
_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.