Part 5

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.

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?"