forward, gazing fearfully, his aroused body pulsing swiftly to the
wonder of the thing, he began to pray again, striving to keep his
excitement under.

"O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!"

Slowly at first, it grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at
the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had
been but a meaningless mass of line and colour. Set on a hill were many
low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground
about them. In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same
material, a church-like building such as he had once seen in a picture,
with a wooden cross at the top. In an open square before this church
were many moving persons strangely garbed, seeming to be Indians. They
surged for a moment about the door of the church, then parted to either
side as if in answer to a signal, and he saw a procession of the same
people coming with bowed heads, scourging themselves with short whips
and thorned branches. At their head walked a brown-cowled monk, holding
aloft before him a small cross, attached by a chain to his waist. As he
led the procession forward, another crowd, some of them being other
brown-cowled monks, parted before the church door, and there, clearly
before his wondering eyes was erected a great cross upon which he saw
the crucified Saviour.

He saw those in the procession form about the cross and fling themselves
upon the ground before it, while all the others round about knelt. He
saw the monk, standing alone, raise the smaller cross in his hands above
them, as if in blessing. High above it all, he saw the crucified one,
the head lying over on the shoulder.