Then he, too, flung himself face down in the sand, weeping hysterically,
calling wildly, and trying again to utter his prayer. Once more he dared
to look up, in some sudden distrust of his eyes. Again he saw the
prostrate figures, the kneeling ones farther back, the brown-cowled monk
with arms upraised, and the face of agony on the cross.

He was down in the sand again, now with enough control of himself to cry
out his prayer over and over. When he next looked, the vision was gone.
Only a few light clouds ruffled the southern horizon.

He sank back on the sands in an ecstasy. His Witness had come--not as he
thought it would, in a moment of spiritual uplift; but when he had been
sunk by his own sin to fearful depths. Nor had it brought any message of
glory for himself, of gifts or powers. Only the mission of suffering and
service and suffering again at the end. But it was enough.

How long he lay in the joy of the realisation he never knew, but sleep
or faintness at last overcame him.

He was revived by the sharp chill of night, and sat up to find his mind
clear, alert, and active with new purposes. He had suffered greatly from
thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could
not move his swollen tongue. He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold
of the desert night aroused all his latent force. He struggled to his
feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he
had left in the morning. How he reached the hills again he never knew,
nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement. But there
he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing
idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the
desert.