s, and we could see with our eyes they were
green.... Captain Bovill was like one transfigured. 'See,' he cried,
'the Mountain of God! Paradise is before you, and the way to Paradise,
as is well known, lies through the devil's country. A little longer,
brave hearts, and we shall be in port.' And so fierce was the spirit
of that man that it lifted our weary shanks and fevered bodies through
another two days of torment. I have no clear memory of those hours.
Assuredly we were all mad and spoke with strange voices. My eyes were
so gummed together that I had often to tear the lids apart to see. But
hourly that green hill came nearer, and towards dusk of the second day
it hung above us. Also we found sweet water, and a multitude of creeping
vines bearing a wholesome berry. Then as we lay down to sleep, the
priest came to us."

Raleigh exclaimed. "What did a priest in those outlands? A Spaniard?"

"Ay. But not such as you and I have ever known elsewhere. Papegot or no,
he was a priest of the Most High. He was white and dry as a bone,
and his eyes burned glassily. Captain Bovill, who liked not the dark
brothers, would have made him prisoner, for he thought him a forerunner
of a Spanish force, but he held up a ghostly hand and all of us were
struck with a palsy of silence. For the man was on the very edge of
death.

"'Moriturus te saluto,' he says, and then he fell to babbling in
Spanish, which we understood the better. Food, such as we had, he would
not touch, nor the sweet well-water. 'I will drink no cup,' he said,
'till I drink the new wine with Christ in His Father's Kingdom. For I
have seen what mortal eyes have not seen, and I have spoken with God's
ministers, and am anointed into a new priesthood.'

"I mind how he sat on the grass, his voice drifting faint and small like
a babe's crying. He told us nothing of what he was or whence he came,
for his soul was possessed of a revelation. 'These be the hills of God,'
he cried. 'In a little you will come to a city of the old kings where
gold is as plentiful as sand of the sea. There they sit frozen in metal
waiting the judgment. Yet they are already judged, and, I take it,
justified, for the dead men sit as warders of a greater treasurehouse.

"I think that we eleven--and two of us near death--were already half out
of the body, for weariness and longing shift the mind from its moorings.
I can hear yet Captain Bovill asking very gently of this greater
treasure-house, and I