there might be some human eye which had seen, which knew, sent a
shiver through him.

"I would give my life a thousand times rather than that," he said
aloud to the swift-flowing river. His head sank on his breast. His lips
murmured in prayer:

"But be merciful to me, Thou just Judge of Israel, for Thou hast made
me, and Thou knowest whereof I am made. Here will I dedicate my life to
Thee for the land's sake. Not for my soul's sake, O my God! If it be
Thy will, let my soul be cast away; but for the soul of him whose body I
slew, and for his land, let my life be the long sacrifice."

Dreams he had had the night before--terrible dreams, which he could
never forget; dreams of a fugitive being hunted through the world,
escaping and eluding, only to be hemmed in once more; on and on till he
grew grey and gaunt, and the hunt suddenly ended in a great morass, into
which he plunged with the howling world behind him. The grey, dank mists
came down on him, his footsteps sank deeper and deeper, and ever the
cries, as of damned spirits, grew in his ears. Mocking shapes flitted
past him, the wings of obscene birds buffeted him, the morass grew up
about him; and now it was all a red moving mass like a dead sea heaving
about him. With a moan of agony he felt the dolorous flood above his
shoulders, and then a cry pierced the gloom and the loathsome misery,
and a voice he knew called to him, "David, David, I am coming!" and he
had awaked with the old hallucination of his uncle's voice calling to
him in the dawn.

It came to him now as he sat by the water-side, and he raised his face
to the sun and to the world. The idlers had left him alone; none were
staring at him now. They were all intent on their own business, each man
labouring after his kind. He heard the voice of a riverman as he toiled
at a rope standing on the corn that filled his ghiassa from end to
end, from keel to gunwale. The man was singing a wild chant of cheerful
labour, the soul of the hard-smitten of the earth rising above the rack
and burden of the body:

"O, the garden where to-day we sow and to-morrow we reap!
O, the sakkia turning by the garden walls;
O, the onion-field and the date-tree growing,
And my hand on the plough-by the blessing of God;
Strength of my soul, O my brother, all's well!"

The meaning of the song got into his heart. He pressed his hand to his
breast with a sudden gesture. It touched something hard. It was his