d consequent famine continued. The
northern kingdom was reduced to despair. So dried up were the wells and
exhausted the cisterns and reservoirs that even the king's household
began to suffer, and it was feared that the horses of the royal stables
would perish. In this dire extremity the king himself set forth from his
palace to seek patches of vegetation and pools of water in the valleys,
while his prime minister Obadiah--a secret worshipper of Jehovah--was
sent in an opposite direction for a like purpose. On his way, in the
almost hopeless search for grass and water, Obadiah met Elijah, who had
been sent from his retreat once more to confront Ahab, and this time to
promise rain. As the most diligent search had been made in every
direction, but in vain, to find Elijah, with a view to his destruction
as the man who "troubled Israel," Obadiah did not believe that the
hunted prophet would voluntarily put himself again in the power of an
angry and hostile tyrant. Yet the prime minister, having encountered the
prophet, was desirous that he should keep his word to appear before the
king, and promise to remove the calamity which even in a pagan land was
felt to be a divine judgment. Elijah having reassured him of his
sincerity, the minister informed his master that the man he sought to
destroy was near at hand, and demanded an interview. The wrathful and
puzzled king went out to meet the prophet, not to take vengeance, but to
secure relief from a sore calamity,--for Ahab reasoned that if Elijah
had power, as the messenger of Omnipotence, to send a drought, he also
had the power to remove it. Moreover, had he not said that there should
be neither rain nor dew but according to his word? So Ahab addressed the
prophet as the author of national calamities, but without threats or
insults. "Art thou he who troubleth Israel?" Elijah loftily,
fearlessly, and reproachfully replied: "I have not troubled Israel, but
thou and thy father's house, in that thou hast forsaken the commandments
of Jehovah, and hast followed Baalim." He then assumes the haughty
attitude of a messenger of divine omnipotence, and orders the king to
assemble all his people, together with the eight hundred and fifty
priests of Baal, at Mount Carmel,--a beautiful hill sixteen hundred feet
high, near the Mediterranean, usually covered with oaks and flowering
shrubs and fragrant herbs. He gives no reasons,--he sternly commands;
and the king obeys, being evidently awed by