"Then said I farewell and we embraced and parted, for I saw that it was meet for him to commune alone with God and gain strength to win his victory.
"The town lay in the west; he went into the north and I into the east.
Once more I was alone."
"Come, let us devise new means of happiness," said my companion. "Let us wander up-stream to the silent cradle of the river. For all day long I hear the river calling my name."
And we journeyed a three days' tramp into the mountains, following the silver river upward and upward to the pure fountain of its birth. And on the way, moved by the glow of intercourse, I told my companion the story of Zenobia, and also that of the old pilgrim whom I met at New Athos. It was strange to us that the peasants in the country should live and die so much more worthily than the educated folk who live in the towns. God made the country, man made the town, and the devil made the country town, was not for us an idle platitude but a burning fact, though we agreed that man was often a much more evil creator than the devil, and that the great capitals of Europe and America were the worst places for Man's heavenly spirit that Time had ever known.
Imagine our three days' journeying, the joy of the lonely one who has found a companion, the sharing of happiness that is doubling it; the beauty to live in, the little daintinesses and prettinesses of Nature to point out; the morning, sun-decked and dewy, the wide happiness of noon, the shadows of the great rocks where we rested, and the flash of the green and silver river tumbling outside in the sunshine; quiescent evening and the old age of the day, sunset and the remembrance of the day's glory, the pathos of looking back to the golden morning.
The first night we made our bed where the plover has her nest, in a grassy hollow on the shelf of a mountain.
"The day is done," said my companion. "A little space of time has died. Now see the vision of the Eternal, which comes after death;" and he pointed to the night sky, in which one by one little lamps were lighting.
The bright world passed away, faded away in my eyes and became at last a dark night sky in which shone countless stars. During the day, my soul expressed itself to itself in the beauty which is for an hour, but at night it re-expressed itself in terms of the Infinite. I looked to my companion, and his eyes and lips shone in the darkness so that he seemed dressed in cloth cut from the night sky itself, and interwoven with stars. We lay together and looked up into the far high sky, we breathed lightly: it seemed we exhaled the scent of flowers that we had inbreathed in the morning—we slept.
And then the morning! The quiet, quiet hours, the flitting of moths in the dawn twilight, the mysterious business of mice among the stones about us, the cold fleeting air just before sunrise, full of ghosts, our own awakening and the majestic sunrise, the exaggeration of all shapes, the birth of shadows, the beaming heralds, glorious rose-red summits and effulgent silvered crags, ten thousand trumpets raised to the zenith, and ten thousand promises outspoken!
We arose, my companion and I—he only seemed to come to life when the first beam touched me. I greeted the sun with my voice, and turning round, there at my feet was my friend, familiar, dear, so ready for living that one would have said the sun himself was his father.