All night he rode, not choosing his way, but letting the horse do the thinking, and in the warm sun of late morning lay down to sleep where the horse had led him.
As the days passed in heedless wandering, the deep hurt of his loss lessened, and he began to take note of the road that led ever on and on to he knew not what, except that it beckoned, as paths and highways alike have a way of doing to the traveler.
As his spirits became lighter, he began to take stock of the country through which he passed, and to note all the strange and curious things that hovered always just outside normal vision. They were not hidden from Druga, who had more than ordinary vision, one of Feronia's witch gifts to him, and many a strange fact of life he picked up from the circumambient apparent emptiness.
It was with this far-seeing sense that Druga now noticed a glowing, golden vibrance spreading an invisible, but terrifically felt glory, all across the northern horizon. He turned the horse's head toward that glory, no more able to avoid the decision than is a moth the flame.
What it was that he sensed he did not surely know, but his memory supplied him with vague and haunting clues which he could not quite drag out into the light of reason. It did not stand to reason, but there it was ahead, the lure of woman augmented by some magic into a glory visible as sunlight, strong as some great whirlpool of energy, drawing him resistlessly on and on.
Many a mile later, Druga came to a point where he could see with his eyes on ahead and into the shining core of that field of golden vibrance.
"One of the universal poles of life!" cried Druga. In his studies Druga had learned that just as the world has a North and South magnetic pole, so does the universe have opposite poles of life-magnetic-energy. One of these is female, and inducts in all life a female nature; the other is male and inducts in all life a male nature, just as the North and South pole induct in all iron and in kindred matter a North and South magnetic pole.
"It is no wonder it draws me, it is the force which makes all life attractive to all other life...."
Druga knew that there was no use his trying to resist the attraction any more than a compass could resist pointing north. So he rode onward into the glory, musing that it was strange this universal pole of infinite space should, in its drifting, have crossed his own path upon this planet.
As he neared the center of the increasing ecstasy, Druga's mind and body became cleaned of all desires but one, and that was to reach the exact center and there remain. Along with others, his affection for Feronia was burned away, leaving him helpless in the grip of this emotion greater by far than any other.