"He will see Jerusalem fall!"
"Woe is me!"
"He will see Rome burn!"
"Mercy!" she groaned.
"He will see the old world perish. He will see the barbarians of the north prevail. He will wander restless, he will be ill-treated and despised everywhere, he will suffer the boundless despair of universal misery, and he will not be able to die. He will envy men their death anguish and their right to die. He will learn how they suck sweet poison from the loveliest blossoms, and how twelve-year-old boys kill themselves from sheer weariness. He is the son of lies and is banished into the kingdom of lies. He will lament over the torments of old age, and he will not be able to die. He will call those children whom Herod slew blessed, and gnash his teeth at the memory of the woman who saved him through a lie."
"Oh, stop!" shrieked the woman. "When will he be redeemed?"
"Perhaps when the eternal Truth is come."
CHAPTER V
The desert lay under a leaden sky. The yellow undulating sandy plain was like a frozen sea that had no end, and so far as eye could see was only bounded by the dark orb of heaven. Here and there, grey, cleft, cone-shaped rocks and blunt-cornered stone boulders or blocks and flat-topped stones not unlike a table rose out of the sand-ocean. Two such stones were situated close together; one was partly covered by the yellow quicksand, the other stood higher out of the ground. On each of them lay a man stretched at full length. One, strong and sinewy, lay on his face, supporting his black-bearded cheeks with his hands so that his half-raised face could gaze over the barren plain. The other, a smaller-made man, lay on his back, making a pillow of his arms, and gazed at the gloomy sky. Both wore the Bedouin dress and were provided with arms which were fastened into, or suspended from, their clothes. Their woolly heads were protected by kerchiefs. Their complexion was as brown as the bark of the pine-tree, their eyes big and sparkling, their lips full and red. The one had a snub nose; the nose of the other was long and thin. So do these men of the desert appear to my mind's eye.