the chance of weather and the slow
change of the seasons, one day was as another. Every morning, when Simon
opened his eyes, he saw the same grey line ripening into red in the
furthest east, until the bright rim pushed itself above that far-off
horizon across which no living creature had ever been known to come.
Slowly the sun swept across the huge arch of the heavens, and as the
shadows shifted from the black rocks which jutted upward from above his
cell, so did the hermit regulate his terms of prayer and meditation.
There was nothing on earth to draw his eye, or to distract his mind,
for the grassy plain below was as void from month to month as the heaven
above. So the long hours passed, until the red rim slipped down on the
further side, and the day ended in the same pearl-grey shimmer with
which it had begun. Once two ravens circled for some days round the
lonely hill, and once a white fish-eagle came from the Dneister and
screamed above the hermit's head. Sometimes red dots were seen on the
green plain where the antelopes grazed, and often a wolf howled in the
darkness from the base of the rocks. Such was the uneventful life of
Simon Melas the anchorite, until there came the day of wrath.

It was in the late spring of the year 375 that Simon came out from his
cell, his gourd in his hand, to draw water from the spring. Darkness had
closed in, the sun had set, but one last glimmer of rosy light rested
upon a rocky peak, which jutted forth from the hill, on the further side
from the hermit's dwelling. As Simon came forth from under his ledge,
the gourd dropped from his hand, and he stood gazing in amazement.

On the opposite peak a man was standing, his outline black in the
fading light. He was a strange almost a deformed figure, short-statured,
round-backed, with a large head, no neck, and a long rod jutting out
from between his shoulders. He stood with his face advanced, and his
body bent, peering very intently over the plain to the westward. In a
moment he was gone, and the lonely black peak showed up hard and naked
against the faint eastern glimmer. Then the night closed down, and all
was black once more.

Simon Melas stood long in bewilderment, wondering who this stranger
could be. He had heard, as had every Christian, of those evil spirits
which were wont to haunt the hermits in the Thebaid and on the skirts
of the Ethiopian waste. The strange shape of this solitary creature,
its dark outline and prowling, int