s the Great Pyramid, on, on, unto the white
desert, his eyes seeing only inward visions.

"Yea, I am Messiah," he cried at length to the vast night, "I am G--!"

The sudden shelving of the sand made him stumble, and in that instant
he became aware of the Sphinx towering over him, its great granite
Face solemn in the moonlight. His voice died away in an awed whisper.
Long, long he gazed into the great stone eyes.

"Speak!" he whispered. "Thou, _Abou-el-Hol_, Father of Terror, thou
who broodedst over the silences ere Moses ben Amram led my people from
this land of bondage, shall I not lead them from their dispersal to
their ancient unity in the day when God shall be One, and His Name
One?"

The Sphinx was silent. The white sea of sand stretched away endlessly
with noiseless billows. The Pyramids threw funereal shadows over the
arid waste.

"Yea," he cried, passionately. "My Father hath not deceived me.
Through me, through me flow the streams of grace to recreate and
rekindle. Hath He not revealed it to me, even ere this day of
Salvation for Jerusalem, by the date of my birth, by the ancient
parchment, by the homage of Nathan, by the faith of my brethren and
the rumor of the nations, by my sufferings, by my self-appointed
martyrdoms, by my long, weary years of forced wanderings to and fro
upon the earth, by my loneliness--ah, God--my loneliness!"

The Sphinx brooded solemnly under the brooding stars. Sabbatai's voice
was as the wail of a wind.

"Yea, I will save Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness
the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace
shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into
pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the
earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his
prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the
desert, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards
from thence, and the Valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she shall
sing there as in the days of her youth and as in the days when she
came up out of the land of Egypt. And I will say to them which were
not my people, 'Thou art my people'; and they shall say, 'Thou art my
God.'"

The Sphinx was silent. And in that silence there was the voice of dead
generations that had bustled and dreamed and passed away, countless as
the grains of desert sand.

Sabbatai ceased and surveyed the Face in answering sile