“He who dwells by the Haunted Water alone,
He shall not remain, but shall perish.”
We came then to the hut, but Silvia would have, nothing to do with Baal's funeral, so that she and Aaron wandered away among the birches, that were no older than they, young birches, slim and white, coloring the sunlight pale green with their leaves. And we went up to the altar-stone, and made ready the funeral, and set the urn to receive the ashes, decently, in order. The pyre was built four-square, of chosen sticks. We did not try to fit Baal together much; we laid him on as he came. And when the birch bark was curling up and the pitchy black smoke of it was pouring upward, we fell on our faces and cried: “Alas, Baal! Woe's me, Baal!”
It was a good ceremony. For when you are doing a ceremony, it depends on how much your feelings are worked up, of course, and very few, if any, of those we had done—and they were many—had ever reached such a point of efficiency as the funeral of Baal-Peor. Moses howled mournfully, as if it were in some tooth that his sorrow lay. The thought of that impressiveness and luxury of feeling lay mellow in our minds long after. “Alas, Baal!”
Somebody snorted near by. We looked up. Over our heads, thrust out beyond the edge of the bowlders, was a strange old face, with heavy brows and jaws and grizzled hair.
The face was distorted, the jaws working. It disappeared, and we sat up, gasping at one another across the funeral pyre, where the black smoke was rolling up faster and faster.
In a moment the face came out on the altar-stone, and looked at us with level brows.
“What ye doin'?”
“My goodness!” gasped Moses. “You aren't another hermit?”
“What ye doin'?”