ehending at first, but slowly yielding to the influence she exerted
until the vision rose before him also with all its moving scenes, in all
its truth and in all its horror. As in a dream the deeds that had been
passed before him, the desolate burial-ground was peopled with forms
and faces of other days, the gravestones rose from the earth and piled
themselves into gloomy houses and remote courts and dim streets and
venerable churches, the dry and twisted trees shrank down, and broadened
and swung their branches as arms, and drew up their roots out of the
ground as feet under them and moved hither and thither. And the knots
and bosses and gnarls upon them became faces, dark, eagle-like and
keen, and the creaking and crackling of the boughs and twigs under the
piercing blast that swept by, became articulate and like the voices of
old men talking angrily together. There were sudden changes from day to
night and from night to day. In dark chambers crouching men took counsel
of blood together under the feeble rays of a flickering lamp. In the
uncertain twilight of winter, muffled figures lurked at the corner of
streets, waiting for some one to pass, who must not escape them. As the
Wanderer gazed and listened, Israel Kafka was transformed. He no longer
stood with outstretched arms, his back against a crumbling slab, his
filmy eyes fixed on Unorna's face. He grew younger; his features were
those of a boy of scarcely thirteen years, pale, earnest and brightened
by a soft light which followed him hither and thither, and he was not
alone. He moved with others through the old familiar streets of
the city, clothed in a fashion of other times, speaking in accents
comprehensible but unlike the speech of to-day, acting in a dim and
far-off life that had once been.

The Wanderer looked, and, as in dreams, he knew that what he saw was
unreal, he knew that the changing walls and streets and houses and
public places were built up of gravestones which in truth were deeply
planted in the ground, immovable and incapable of spontaneous motion; he
knew that the crowds of men and women were not human beings but gnarled
and twisted trees rooted in the earth, and that the hum of voices which
reached his ears was but the sound of dried branches bending in the
wind; he knew that Israel Kafka was not the pale-faced boy who glided
from place to place followed everywhere by a soft radiance; he knew that
Unorna was the source and origin of the vision,