Canopus. He
stretched himself upon the clear sand and was back in the inner vast
that searched for the upper vast. Since the grasses of the Campagna
there had been a long search, and his bark had encountered many a
wind, head winds and favoring winds, and had beaten from coast to
coast.

"O God, for the open, divine sea and Wisdom the compass--"

He lay beneath the palm; he put his arm over his eyes. For an hour he
had been whelmed in an old sense, bitter and stately, of the woe, the
broken knowledge, the ailing and the pain of the world. All the
world.... That other caravan, where was it?... Where were all
caravans? And all the bewilderment and all the false hopes and all the
fool's paradises. All the crying in the night. Children....

Little by little he recognized that he was seeing it as panorama....
None saw a panorama until one was out of the plane of its
components--out of the immediate plane. Gotten out as all must get
out, by the struggling Thought, which, the thing done, uses its
eyes....

He looked at his past. He did not beat his breast nor cry out in
repentance, but he saw with a kind of wonder the plains of darkness.
Oh, the deserts, and the slow-moving caravans in them!

He lay very still beneath the palm. All the world.... _All._

"_All is myself._"

"Ian? Myself--myself--myself!"

He heard a step upon the sand--the putting by of a branch. The Sufi
Abdallah stood beside him. Alexander made a movement.

"Lie still," said the other, "I will sit here, for sweet is the
night." He took his place, white-robed, a gleaming upon the sand.
Silent almost always, it was nothing that he should sit silent now,
quiet, moveless, gone away apparently among the stars.

The moments dropped, each a larger round. Glenfernie moved, sat up.

"I've felt you and your calm in our caravaning. Let me see if my
Arabic will carry me here!--What have you that I have not and that I
long for?"

"I have nought that you have not."

"But you see the having, and I do not."

"You are beginning to see."

The wind breathed in the oasis palms. The earth turned, seeking the
sun for her every chamber, the earth made pilgrimage around the sun,
eying point after point of that excellence, the earth journeyed with
the sun, held by the invisible cords.

"I wish new sight--I wish new touch--I wish comprehension!"

"You are beginning to have it."

"I have more than I had.... Yes, I know it--"

"There is birth.... Then comes th