ness,
leaned over the counters devoted to "inspirational literature."

One rainy afternoon she threw those books aside and went to church.

Here was an awesomeness appropriate to a mortal conception of God--a
distant glitter of candles beyond colossal pillars, a fragrance of
stale incense, a silence in which the shadowy crimson of banners,
suspended high in the nave, was like a soft blaring of celestial
trumpets. Exaltation took hold of her as she recalled the miracles of
orthodox faith and the eternal promise of compassion.

She prayed for a long while, lost in the sweetness of the incense, her
heart quivering from the memory of her few hours of love.

Whenever she received a letter from him she tore open the envelope with
one movement, and pressed against her face those crackling sheets of
paper that seemed to exhale the odor of a far-off land. He had written
it in the wilds, before his tent, while a naked black messenger stood
waiting. The letter sealed, the messenger had stuck it into a split
wand, and straightway had set off at a trot toward the coast.

Now she wanted to know precisely what his surroundings looked like.
When she had pored over the map she collected all the books about that
region.

She was surprised to find it impregnated with romance.

It was the "Eldorado" of remote antiquity. Thither, in the dawn of
recorded history, had gone the Phoenician galleys, full of hook-nosed
men in purple and brass, their beards scented with spikenard. From the
mining towns that they built in the jungle, surrounded by cyclopean
walls and adorned with grotesque stone images, came the stores of gold
with which the Sidonians enriched King Solomon. To-day all those
workings were apparently exhausted. The Zimbabwe--the cities of
stone--had crumbled; the jungle had closed in; and in that wilderness
only a heap of rubble, or the choked mouth of a pit, remained here and
there to mark the source of the metal that had gilded the temple at
Jerusalem, and the Semitic shrines to Baal and Astoreth.

But a new letter told her that he had crossed the Zambesi.

He had gone into a land almost wholly unexplored by its present
claimants, full of fever-breeding marshes, barren mountain gorges, and
great forests. The inhabitants were an unconquered race of warriors
called the Mambava, fiercer than the lions and leopards about them,
hostile to strangers, and given to uncanny customs. They worshipped
among other things--per