it is blasphemy that
you are saying. I forbid it. You understand? I forbid it."

Vanamee turned on him with a sudden cry. "Then, tell your God to give
her back to me!"

Sarria started away from him, his eyes widening in astonishment,
surprised out of all composure by the other's outburst. Vanamee's
swarthy face was pale, the sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes were marked
with great black shadows. The priest no longer recognised him. The
face, that face of the ascetic, lean, framed in its long black hair and
pointed beard, was quivering with the excitement of hallucination. It
was the face of the inspired shepherds of the Hebraic legends, living
close to nature, the younger prophets of Israel, dwellers in the
wilderness, solitary, imaginative, believing in the Vision, having
strange delusions, gifted with strange powers. In a brief second of
thought, Sarria understood. Out into the wilderness, the vast arid
desert of the Southwest, Vanamee had carried his grief. For days, for
weeks, months even, he had been alone, a solitary speck lost in the
immensity of the horizons; continually he was brooding, haunted with his
sorrow, thinking, thinking, often hard put to it for food. The body was
ill-nourished, and the mind, concentrated forever upon one subject, had
recoiled upon itself, had preyed upon the naturally nervous temperament,
till the imagination had become exalted, morbidly active, diseased,
beset with hallucinations, forever in search of the manifestation, of
the miracle. It was small wonder that, bringing a fancy so distorted
back to the scene of a vanished happiness, Vanamee should be racked with
the most violent illusions, beset in the throes of a veritable hysteria.

"Tell your God to give her back to me," he repeated with fierce
insistence.

It was the pitch of mysticism, the imagination harassed and goaded
beyond the normal round, suddenly flipping from the circumference,
spinning off at a tangent, out into the void, where all things seemed
possible, hurtling through the dark there, groping for the supernatural,
clamouring for the miracle. And it was also the human, natural protest
against the inevitable, the irrevocable; the spasm of revolt under the
sting of death, the rebellion of the soul at the victory of the grave.

"He can give her back to me if He only will," Vanamee cried. "Sarria,
you must help me. I tell you--I warn you, sir, I can't last much longer
under it. My head is all wrong with it--I've no m