me question, and
every generation gives the same answer; and scourges the divinity out of
its midst, and finds its idol in brute force and low greed."

She only dimly comprehended, not well knowing why her words had thus
roused him. She pondered awhile, then her face cleared.

"But the end?" she asked. "The dead God is the God of all these people
round us now, and they have built great places in His honour, and they
bow when they pass His likeness in the highway or the market-place. But
with Barabbas--what was the end? It seems that they loathe and despise
him?"

Arslan laughed a little.

"His end? In Syria may be the vultures picked his bones, where they lay
whitening on the plains--those times were primitive, the world was
young. But in our day Barabbas lives and dies in honour, and has a tomb
that stares all men in the face, setting forth his virtues, so that all
who run may read. In our day Barabbas--the Barabbas of money-greeds and
delicate cunning, and the theft which has risen to science, and the
assassination that kills souls and not bodies, and the crime that deals
moral death and not material death--our Barabbas, who is crowned Fraud
in the place of mailed Force, lives always in purple and fine linen, and
ends in the odours of sanctity with the prayers of priests over his
corpse."

He spoke with a certain fierce passion that rose in him whenever he
thought of that world which had rejected him, and had accepted so many
others, weaker in brain and nerve, but stronger in one sense, because
more dishonest; and as he spoke he went straight to a wall on his right,
where a great sea of grey paper was stretched, untouched and ready to
his hand.

She would have spoken, but he made a motion to silence.

"Hush! be quiet," he said to her, almost harshly, "I have thought of
something."

And he took the charcoal and swept rapidly with it over the dull blank
surface till the vacancy glowed with life. A thought had kindled in him;
a vision had arisen before him.

The scene around him vanished utterly from his sight. The grey stone
walls, the square windows through which the fading sun-rays fell; the
level pastures and sullen streams, and paled skies without, all faded
away as though they had existed only in a dream.

All the empty space about him became peopled with many human shapes that
for him had breath and being, though no other eye could have beheld
them. The old Syrian world of eighteen hundred years befor