the
dusky woman who had denied her own son and betrayed the stranger
wanderers. Whence he came he did not know himself. He loved the
lonely desert, the home of great thoughts. He did not fear the robbers
of the desert, for he was stronger than they because he had nothing.
Now and again the desire came to him to behold a human face, so that he
might read therein whether the souls of men looked upwards or sank
downwards. The old man went up to the woman who had denied her own son
and betrayed the fugitives. And he said: "Daughter of Uriah! twice
have you given your son life: once through pleasure, once through a
lie. So his life will be a lie. He will breathe without living, and
yet he will not be able to die!"

"Mercy!" she cried.

"He will see Jerusalem fall!"

"Woe is me!"

"He will see Rome burn!"

"Mercy!" she groaned.

"He will see the old world perish. He will see the barbarians of the
north prevail. He will wander restless, he will be ill-treated and
despised everywhere, he will suffer the boundless despair of universal
misery, and he will not be able to die. He will envy men their death
anguish and their right to die. He will learn how they suck sweet
poison from the loveliest blossoms, and how twelve-year-old boys kill
themselves from sheer weariness. He is the son of lies and is banished
into the kingdom of lies. He will lament over the torments of old age,
and he will not be able to die. He will call those children whom Herod
slew blessed, and gnash his teeth at the memory of the woman who saved
him through a lie."

"Oh, stop!" shrieked the woman. "When will he be redeemed?"

"Perhaps when the eternal Truth is come."

CHAPTER V

The desert lay under a leaden sky. The yellow undulating sandy plain
was like a frozen sea that had no end, and so far as eye could see was
only bounded by the dark orb of heaven. Here and there, grey, cleft,
cone-shaped rocks and blunt-cornered stone boulders or blocks and
flat-topped stones not unlike a table rose out of the sand-ocean. Two
such stones were situated close together; one was partly covered by the
yellow quicksand, the other stood higher out of the ground. On each of
them lay a man stretched at full length. One, strong and sinewy, lay
on his face, supporting his black-bearded cheeks with his hands so that
his half-raised face could gaze over the barren plain. The other, a
smaller-made man, lay on his back, making a pillow of his