He lay beneath the palm; he put his arm over his eyes. For an hour he had been whelmed in an old sense, bitter and stately, of the woe, the broken knowledge, the ailing and the pain of the world. All the world.... That other caravan, where was it?... Where were all caravans? And all the bewilderment and all the false hopes and all the fool's paradises. All the crying in the night. Children....
Little by little he recognized that he was seeing it as panorama.... None saw a panorama until one was out of the plane of its components—out of the immediate plane. Gotten out as all must get out, by the struggling Thought, which, the thing done, uses its eyes....
He looked at his past. He did not beat his breast nor cry out in repentance, but he saw with a kind of wonder the plains of darkness. Oh, the deserts, and the slow-moving caravans in them!
He lay very still beneath the palm. All the world.... All.
"All is myself."
"Ian? Myself—myself—myself!"
He heard a step upon the sand—the putting by of a branch. The Sufi Abdallah stood beside him. Alexander made a movement.
"Lie still," said the other, "I will sit here, for sweet is the night." He took his place, white-robed, a gleaming upon the sand. Silent almost always, it was nothing that he should sit silent now, quiet, moveless, gone away apparently among the stars.
The moments dropped, each a larger round. Glenfernie moved, sat up.
"I've felt you and your calm in our caravaning. Let me see if my Arabic will carry me here!—What have you that I have not and that I long for?"