ing. What
Silvester had said just now was beginning to be true of this man also.
The touch of the powdery soil and the warm pebbles beneath the priest's
bare feet seemed something apart from the consciousness that usually
regards the things of sense as more real and more intimate than the
things of spirit. Matter still had a reality, still occupied space, but
it was of a subjective nature, the result of internal rather than
external powers. He appeared to himself already to be scarcely more than
a soul, intent and steady, united by a thread only to the body and the
world with which he was yet in relations. He knew that the appalling
heat was there; once even, before his eyes a patch of beaten ground
cracked and lisped as water that touches hot iron, as he trod upon it.
He could feel the heat upon his forehead and hands, his whole body was
swathed and soaked in it; yet he regarded it as from an outside
standpoint, as a man with neuritis perceives that the pain is no longer
in his hand but in the pillow which supports it. So, too, with what his
eyes looked upon and his ears heard; so, too, with that faint bitter
taste that lay upon his lips and nostrils. There was no longer in him
fear or even hope--he regarded himself, the world, and even the
enshrouding and awful Presence of spirit as facts with which he had but
little to do. He was scarcely even interested; still less was he
distressed. There was Thabor before him--at least what once had been
Thabor, now it was no more than a huge and dusky dome-shape which
impressed itself upon his retina and informed his passive brain of its
existence and outline, though that existence seemed no better than that
of a dissolving phantom.

It seemed then almost natural--or at least as natural as all else--as he
came in through the passage and opened the chapel-door, to see that the
floor was crowded with prostrate motionless figures. There they lay, all
alike in the white burnous which he had given out last night; and, with
forehead on arms, as during the singing of the Litany of the Saints at
an ordination, lay the figure he knew best and loved more than all the
world, the shoulders and white hair at a slight elevation upon the
single altar step. Above the plain altar itself burned the six tall
candles; and in the midst, on the mean little throne, stood the
white-metal monstrance, with its White Centre....

Then he, too, dropped, and lay as he was....

* * * * *

He did not know