The Wanderers

by Mary Johnston

This time he faced from the oasis to the wider spread of the desert, two leagues of sand waves between him and the monastery in whose laura, or circle of hermitages, this cavern was numbered. He with other anchorites wove palm mats and baskets. At intervals came monks, gathering up what was done and taking to the monastery, whence all were sent in trade to the nearest city. Dorotheus’s fingers, that at first had been unskilful at the work, moved now with the precisest ease. Born thirty-six years before upon the Danube, of Christian parents, educated in Italy, in Verona, a soldier under Odoacer, King of Italy, left for dead on the field of Soissons, captive among the Franks, maker of a daring escape, wanderer in Spain, recipient one night of a dazzling vision, turning to the Church, catechumen, baptized, crossing to Africa, wanderer there through dangers and strange adventures, monk at last and ascetic—he had now woven palm mats for six years, woven palm mats and made his garden and walked the desert up and down.

Fast and vigil and discipline had made him lean but not emaciated, deep-eyed but not dim-eyed. In the desert were all manner of hermits, and some lived but to torture themselves, and some through long disuse of mind were nigh mindless. There were others who were “moderates.” Dorotheus was of these. The greater reputation clung to the self-torturers, the chained to rocks, the unsleeping, uneating, the ever-scourging, the sealed-eyes, the drawers-back from water. To most in this time these seemed the more saintly. They were the great seers of visions, hearers of voices, wrestlers with dæmons, workers of miracles.

Perhaps Dorotheus, too, aspired to saintship, but found it not wholly upon that road. Ascetic, he yet rested human. He abode in the desert, a man of strong frame, tawny-haired, supple-fingered, with a working and a questing mind and a soul that was learning itself. For a long time he had had a life of outward adventure; now he was adventuring inward.

The sun rode high, the desert swam in heat. The sun went to the west. Dorotheus put by the mat, ate again sparingly of the bread and dates, drank of the water, then taking a hoe that he had fashioned for himself crossed the glaring sand to the oasis.

Here was neither heat nor glare, but shade rich and sweet, shade, and cool sliding water, and upon the side opposed to his cave the little garden like a sliver of Paradise, that he had made for the love of making. Dorotheus applied himself to hoeing the earth about the roots of vines which he had procured from the monastery vineyard. The grapes hung down, green yet, but when they were ripe he did not propose to eat them, nor yet to press wine from them. The birds would eat them, the birds and Arla the jackal.

Looking east, between the palm stems, he saw the desert waves, low and high, like coloured, solidified water, saw his own cave and the expanse beyond, and far on the horizon a smudge which would be the palms of the great oasis that held the monastery. When in his hoeing he turned, there rose before him, back wall to his garden, a small forest of palms with other trees and shrubs and linking creepers. You could not see far into it: almost at once a green gloom shut down. For reasons he had never pierced it.

It might be a quarter-mile through to the western edge of the oasis, and to the desert waves on that side, low and high, like coloured, solidified water. And thence it might be two leagues and more to the palms and the springs in the desert where was builded the convent village of St. Agatha, dwelled in by a thousand nuns. And the laura of St. Agatha, the circle of her women anchorites, swinging out into the desert, touched at its far eastern point, as the laura of the monastery, swinging into the desert, touched at its far western point, the little oasis and those ridges of desert stone, long since dug into by vanished kings. And eastward from the green islet the hermit Dorotheus had his cave, and westward from it the hermit Dorothea had hers. Between them was the oasis, and each made a garden upon the edge facing his or her cavern. And between the gardens was the quarter-mile of thickly growing palms and other trees, of green gloom and netting creepers, and no track across, made by nature, or by man or woman. The quarter-mile might as well have been the diameter of the globe.

But not quite so. Each hermit, wandering in the desert that swept around the watered hand’s-breadth, had taken the other’s presence in gleams and intimations. Perhaps each had seen the other afar; perhaps from some sand crest each had marked the other digging in a garden. Perhaps through the wilderness between had come perceptions of human neighbourhood. Each had knowledge that two hermitages bordered this green spot in the desert—his own and a woman’s, her own and a man’s. Perhaps other threads of light, quiverings, vibrations, travelled to and fro by roads beneath and above all usual consciousness. But there was no such contact as is customary between neighbours pledged to one mode of life, and dwelling but a quarter-mile apart, no friendly passing of the time of day, no exchange of the fruits of the garden, no deeper converse and gifts of ideas. There was no close contact, no near vision nor speech together at all.

The two, man and woman, dwelled in caves beside fruit trees and cool water, and were weavers of palm mats and makers of gardens by virtue of being “moderates”—rather, in the eyes of the sixth century, a deplorable weakness than any virtue! Your true ascetic from the bone outward, your unadulterate hermit-saint, your anchorite with never a Laodicean smirch, abhorred oases!—These two, monk and nun, were, then, “moderates.” Nevertheless, for the man to have gazed, free-willed, upon the woman, and for the woman to have gazed, free-willed, upon the man, and for the two to have stood and talked, that by either, pledged to God, and walking the sixth century, would have been taken to slant toward the unpardonable sin.

Dorotheus hoed the earth around his vines, and then he tended orange trees, citron and pomegranate. The sun rode low, and the palms cast hugely long shadows. The sun touched the horizon, and the sand turned into rose-coloured glass. Arla the jackal came out of his den, stretched and shook himself, then trotted over the sand to the water, slipping beneath the trees. Dorotheus, too, kneeled by the water and drank. Then he shouldered his hoe and he and the jackal went up the sand slope to the cave. As they went they heard distantly the bell that was fastened about the neck of the goat that had followed the hermit Dorothea from St. Agatha. And at the turn of the night, when he waked, he heard through the thin, desert air, the crowing of a cock which she had bought with palm baskets from some desert vagrant.