uth_. And the holy man
Giovanni marvelled to see so many truths all diversely coloured. He saw
red, and blue, and green, and yellow, but he saw no white--not even the
one the Pope made proclamation of, to wit, "On this rock have I built my
Church and committed thereto the crowns of all the world." Indeed this
device was all red and as if blood-stained.

And the holy man sighed:

"Then I am never to find on the wheel of the universe the pure, white
Truth, the immaculate and candid Truth, I would find."

And he called upon Truth, crying with tears in his eyes:

"Truth! Truth! for whose sake I am to die, show yourself before your
martyr's eyes."

And lo! as he was wailing out the words, the living wheel began to
revolve, and the devices, running one into the other, no longer kept
distinct, while on the great disk came circles of every hue, circles
wider and wider the further they were from the centre.

Then as the motion grew faster, these circles disappeared one by one;
the widest vanished first, because the speed was swiftest near the
felloe of the wheel. But directly the wheel began to spin so fast the
eye could not see it move and it seemed to stand motionless, the
smallest circles too disappeared, like the morning-star when the sun
pales the hills of Assisi.

Then at the last the wheel looked all white; and it overpassed in
brilliance the translucent orb where the Florentine poet saw Beatrice in
the dewdrop. It seemed as though an Angel, wiping the eternal pearl to
cleanse it of all stains, had set it on the Earth, so like was the wheel
to the Moon, when she shines high in the heavens lightly veiled under
the gauze of filmy clouds. For at these times no shadow of a man
carrying sticks, no mark at all, shows on her opalescent surface. Even
so never a stain was visible on the wheel of light.

And the holy man Giovanni heard a voice which said to him:

"Behold that same white Truth you were fain to contemplate. And know it
is built up of the divers contradictory truths, in the same fashion as
all colours go to make up white. The little children of Viterbo know
this, for having spun their tops striped with many colours on the flags
on the Great Market. But the doctors of Bologna never guessed the
reasons for this appearance. Now in every one of the devices was a
portion of the Truth, and all together make up the true and veritable
device."

"Alas! and alas!" replied the holy man, "how am I to read it? For my