frica, but I knew now
that I was not going to Africa. Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past
I had been in Africa; often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil
would be under my foot, but now I was not going there! To-day I looked
westward over River-Ocean, unknown to our fathers and unknown to
ourselves. It was unknown as the future of the world.

Ocean piled before me. From where I lay it seemed to run uphill to one
pale line, nor blue nor white, set beneath the solid gray. Over that
hilltop, what? Only other hills and plains, water, endlessly water,
until the waves, so much mightier than waves of that blue sea we knew
best, should beat at last against Asia shore! So high, so deep, so vast,
so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers! No sails over
the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast save close at hand where mariners
held to the skirts of Mother. Europe. Ocean vast, Ocean black, Ocean
unknown. Yet there, too, life and the knowing of life ran somehow
continuous.

It wiled me from my smaller self. How had we all suffered, we the whole
earth! But we were moving, we the world with none left out, moving
toward That which held worlds, which was conscious above worlds. Long
the journey, long the adventure, but it was not worth while fearing, it
was not worth while whining! I was not alone Jayme de Marchena, nor Juan
Lepe, nor this name nor that nor the other.

There was now a great space of quiet in my mind. Suddenly formed there
the face and figure of Don Enrique de Cerda whose life I had had
the good hap to save. He was far away with the Queen and King who
beleaguered Granada. I had not seen him for ten years. A moment before
he had rested among the host of figures in the unevenly lighted land of
memory. Now he stood forth plainly and seemed to smile.

I took the leading. With the inner eye I have seen lines of light like
subtle shining cords running between persons. Such a thread stretched
now between me and Enrique de Cerda. I determined to make my way, as
Juan Lepe, through the mountains and over the plain of Granada to Santa
Fe.

CHAPTER II

SET will to an end and promptly eyes open to means! I did not start for
Granada from Palos but from Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter
in a small merchant train carrying goods of sorts to Zarafa that was a
mountain town taken from the Moors five years back. I was to these folk
Juan Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man used to ships but now for some
rea