The day of Dorothea had been much like the day of Dorotheus. Details might differ, but essentials did not. Before cockcrow she kneeled upon the sand before the cave, she lay upon her face and prayed. “Salvation is from within.... The Kingdom of God is within you.... O God, let the Kingdom dawn!” prayed Dorothea. When she rose the east was a pearl, and all the desert sand a pearl, and the trees of the oasis grey pearl above a rope of mist. She took the scourge of cords and used it, laid it by and prayed again, “O God, the long pilgrimage through the desert!—O God, let me lift and cleave to Thee!” Sunrise brightened the sand, gave its poised waves a thousand hues, then up came the red globe, and the day, or short or long, was here. Dorothea got her breakfast—a few raisins, a little bread, a measure of water from the jar in the corner. Across the sand, at the edge of the oasis, the goat Even I cropped its meal, and the cock Welcome strutted and clapped its wings. Dorothea was so “moderate” that she smiled to see them both. Likewise her moderation was such that both the cave and she herself were clean.
The nun as well as the monk had a Book of the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles. Her cell, as his cell, had fastened to the wall a great wooden cross. Dorothea, standing before the sloping shelf upon which it was laid, read the first pages of the Gospel of Saint John, then stretched herself upon the rocky floor before the cross. “In the beginning.... O Light that shineth in darkness—”
She, also, wove palm mats and baskets; she, also, across the sand, at the edge of the oasis that faced her cell, made a garden. Her morning rites performed, she crossed the glaring sand to the shadow of the palms. She wished water to reach a spot that was more arid than it should be, and she dug with a spade, which she had begged from the convent, a canal through which it might flow. She worked with strength and expertness where at first she had worked weakly and unskilfully. Practice in digging, as in other things, was like a waking memory....
This was her birthday. She was thirty-four years old.... She saw the house in Alexandria in which she was born, and the wealthy Claudius, her father, vaunting his marble statues, his gems, and his descent from Vigilius and Eudocia, martyred in Rome three hundred years ago, and her mother Verina, a fair-haired, silent woman, born across the middle sea, of a Roman father and a barbarian mother, and the nurse Anna with her endless story-telling, merry and sad, and other house slaves for whom she felt fondness, and her teachers Sylvanus and old Hipparchus.
Upon her knees she took out the black earth with her hands and heaped it in a wide basket. The cock Welcome pecked after her, and the bell of Even I made not far away a rhythmic sound.... All her old, Alexandrian, gay companions when she passed from the schoolroom to the world. Alexandrian life—Alexandrian life.... The daughter of Claudius—the daughter of Claudius....
The trench that she was making was growing deeper. She worked with strong, sweeping, ordered movements. Behind her stood the thickly growing palms and netting vines of that undisturbed belt between her garden and the garden of the hermit Dorotheus.... She found that without conscious thought she had turned so that the barrier wood was before her. She was sitting back upon her heels, the spade lying idle beside her, and she was gazing through the wood. What was a quarter-mile of tree-thronged space?... The daughter of Claudius—the daughter of Claudius....
She sprang to her feet, left the garden and went back to the cave. She opened again the book upon its shelf and read, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” She closed the book, took the basket she was weaving and sat with it in the cave mouth. Alexandria ... and all the crises of her life there—Claudius’s daughter—Claudius’s daughter! She wove the palm shreds in and out. Her fingers had been trained in fine work and upon the lute—she wove the basket very skilfully. Perhaps, in practising, she remembered, too, how one made baskets. At any rate, now she had been digging in the earth of this oasis, now she had been making palm baskets, now she had fasted, watched and prayed, hermit in this cave, for four torrid summers and four winters of balm. Thirty-four to-day. “Lord, Lord, let me not think of me and my years—”
At sunset she heard the jackal bark. Had she not heard it she would have been startled, so much was its voice a part of this disk of earth she lived upon. She expected it as Dorotheus, on the other side of the oasis, listened for the bell of Even I and the crowing of the cock Welcome. He did not know their names, nor she that the jackal was named Arla. From pilgrims going the round of the desert anchorites each had gained knowledge that the oasis stood between the cells of the hermit Dorothea and the hermit Dorotheus. Each knew that the other was “moderate,” not bitterly, keenly, marvellously ascetic. Each knew how he—how she—disappointed the pilgrims.
Night in the desert was a lovely thing. The daughter of Claudius lay and admired—the daughter of Verina gave mystic meanings to the large bright stars and the ebony and ivory of the sand—the nursling of Anna heard the palm tops telling stories—the pupil of old Hipparchus heard again read Plotinus and Porphyry—the Christian nun thought, “If it were healed how lovely were the world!” She slept, till Welcome waked her with his crowing.
However rapidly might move the hermit’s inner world, however packed and thronged the spiritual time, outwardly one desert hour, one desert day, was highly like another. Nor did the inner world move always swiftly, smoothly, and into spiritual time came dry seasons. The desert disease was listlessness, attacking body and mind, listlessness, and strange spells of homesickness and of craving for red pottage.... The regimen for that was the scourge and prayer.