ed off to the south, idly
scanning the horizon, his eyes level with the sandy plain. Then
something made him sit quickly up and stare intently, his bared head
craning forward. To the south, lying low, was a mass of light clouds,
volatile, changing with opalescent lights as he looked. A little to the
left of these clouds, while his head was on the sand, he thought his
eyes had detected certain squared lines.

Now he scanned the spot with a feverish eagerness. At first there was
only the endless empty blue. Then, when his wonder was quite dead and he
was about to lie down, there came a miracle of miracles,--a vision in
the clear blue of the sky. And this time the lines were coherent. He,
the dying sinner, had caught, clearly and positively for one awful
second in that sky, the flashing impression of a cross. It faded as
soon as it came, vanished while he gazed, leaving him in gasping,
fainting wonder at the marvel.

And then, before he could think or question himself, the sky once more
yielded its vision; again that image of a cross stayed for a second in
his eyes, and this time he thought there were figures about it. Some
picture was trying to show itself to him. Still reaching his body
forward, gazing fearfully, his aroused body pulsing swiftly to the
wonder of the thing, he began to pray again, striving to keep his
excitement under.

"O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!"

Slowly at first, it grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at
the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had
been but a meaningless mass of line and colour. Set on a hill were many
low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground
about them. In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same
material, a church-like building such as he had once seen in a picture,
with a wooden cross at the top. In an open square before this church
were many moving persons strangely garbed, seeming to be Indians. They
surged for a moment about the door of the church, then parted to either
side as if in answer to a signal, and he saw a procession of the same
people coming with bowed heads, scourging themselves with short whips
and thorned branches. At their head walked a brown-cowled monk, holding
aloft before him a small cross, attached by a chain to his waist. As he
led the procession forward, another crowd, some of them being other
brown-cowled monks, parted before the church door, and there, clearl