as I looked. So I
bade farewell to the old man in whose house I had learned to love the
hour of visitation and the Source and the name of him who opened it; and
I kissed the hands and the brow of the little Ruamie who had entered my
heart, and went forth sadly from the land of Koorma into other lands, to
look for the Blue Flower.

II

In the Book of the Voyage without a Harbour is written the record of the
ten years which passed before I came back again to the city of Saloma.

It was not easy to find, for I came down through the mountains, and as
I looked from a distant shoulder of the hills for the little bay full of
greenery, it was not to be seen. There was only a white town shining
far off against the brown cliffs, like a flake of mica in a cleft of
the rocks. Then I slept that night, full of care, on the hillside, and
rising before dawn, came down in the early morning toward the city.

The fields were lying parched and yellow under the sunrise, and great
cracks gaped in the earth as if it were thirsty. The trenches and
channels were still there, but there was little water in them; and
through the ragged fringes of the rusty vineyards I heard, instead of
the cheerful songs of the vintagers, the creaking of dry windlasses and
the hoarse throb of the pumps in sunken wells. The girdle of gardens had
shrunk like a wreath of withered flowers, and all the bright embroidery,
of earth was faded to a sullen gray.

At the foot of an ancient, leafless olive-tree I saw a group of people
kneeling around a newly opened well. I asked a man who was digging
beside the dusty path what this might mean. He straightened himself for
a moment, wiping the sweat from his brow, and answered, sullenly, "They
are worshipping the windlass: how else should they bring water into
their fields?" Then he fell furiously to digging again, and I passed on
into the city.

There was no sound of murmuring streams in the streets, and down the
main bed of the river I saw only a few shallow puddles, joined together
by a slowly trickling thread. Even these were fenced and guarded so that
no one might come near to them, and there were men going among to the
houses with water-skins on their shoulders, crying "Water! Water to
sell!"

The marble pools in the open square were empty; and at one of them there
was a crowd looking at a man who was being beaten with rods. A bystander
told me that the officers of the city had ordered him to be punished
beca