extraordinary
man, a kind of prophet all on his own; he was as far away from that
congregation as Columbus was from his crew when he first sighted the
Indies."

"I've met one or two prophets in my time, and their concern has always
been with their audience first, themselves second and their vision
last. Warlock is the other way round. He should have been a hermit, not
the leader of a community. Well, it interested me. I came again and
again ... I'm going to stay on now until the end."

"The end?" asked Maggie.

"The end of myself or the Chapel, whichever comes first. I wrote a
story once--a very bad one--about some merchants--why merchants I don't
know--who were flung on a desert island. It was all jungle and
desolation, and then suddenly they came upon a little white Temple. It
doesn't matter what happened afterwards. I've myself forgotten most of
it, but I remember that the sailors used the Temple in different ways
to keep their hopes and expectations alive. Their expectations that one
day a ship would come and save them ... and so far as I remember they
became imaginative about the Temple, and fancied that the Unknown God
of it would help them to regain their private affairs: one of them
wanted to get back to his girl, another to his favourite pub, another
to his money-making, another to his collection of miniatures. And they
used to sit and look at the Temple day after day and expect something
to happen. When the ship came at last they wouldn't go into it because
they couldn't bear to think that something should happen at last and
they not be there to see it. Oh yes, one of them went back, I remember.
But his actual meeting with his girl was so disappointing in comparison
with his long expectation of it in front of the Temple that he took the
next boat back to the island ... but he never found it again. He
travelled everywhere and died, a disappointed man, at sea."

Mr. Magnus was fond of telling little stories, obscure and pointless,
and Maggie supposed that it was a literary habit. On this occasion he
continued to talk quite naturally for his own satisfaction. "Yes, one
can make oneself believe in anything. I have believed in all sorts of
things. In England, of course, people have believed in nothing except
that things will always be as they always have been--a useful belief
considering that things have never been as they always were. In the old
days, when the Boer War hadn't interfered with tradition, it must