ew from south to north. At last--the
climb seemed to her longer than the whole previous way--at last she
reached the top. Opening her eyes, which she had kept half closed, she
saw--oh, bliss! she saw deliverance. Before her, at a long distance, it
is true, yet plainly visible, glittered a steel-blue line. It was the
sea! And at the side, eastward, she fancied she saw houses, trees.
Surely that was Decimum; and a little farther inland rose a dark hill--
the end of the desert. She imagined,--yet surely it was impossible to
see so far,--she believed or dreamed that, on the summit of the hill,
she beheld three slender black lines relieved against the clear
horizon. Surely those were the three spears on the grave. "Beloved One!
My hero!" she cried, "I am coming."

With outstretched arms she tried to hurry down the sand-hill on the
northeastern: side, but, at the first step, she sank in to the
knee,--deeper still, to the waist. She could still see the blue sky
above her. Once more, with her last strength, she flung both arms high
above her head, thrusting her hands into the sand to the wrists
to drag herself up; once more the large beautiful antelope eyes
gazed beseechingly--ah, so despairingly--up to the silent sky; another
wild, desperate pull--a hollow sound as of a heavy fall. The whole
sand-mountain, shaken by her struggles and swept by the hurricane from
the south, fell over her northward, burying her nearly a hundred feet
deep, stifling her in a moment. Above her lofty grave the desert storm
raved exultingly.

* * * * *

For decades the beautiful corpse lay undisturbed, unprofaned, until
that ever-changing architect, the wind, gradually removed the sand-hill
and, one stormy night, at last blew it away entirely.

Just at that time a pious hermit, one of the desert monks who begged
his scanty fare in Decimum and carried it to his sand cave, passed
along. Often and often he had come that way; the hurricane had bared
the skeleton only the day before. The old man stood before it,
thoughtful. The little dazzlingly white bones were so dainty, so
delicate, as if fashioned by an artist's hand; the garments, like the
flesh, had long been completely consumed by the trickling moisture; but
the lofty sand ridge had faithfully kept its beautiful secret, not a
bone was missing. For a human generation the dry sand of the desert,
though garments and flesh had gone to decay, had preserved uninjured