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. Sabbataï'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.
Sabbataï ceased and surveyed the Face in answering silence, his own face growing as inscrutable.
"We are strong and lonely—thou and I," he whispered at last. But the Sphinx was silent.
(Here endeth the First Scroll.)