ever gathered to greet a guest. Dim tales had reached them of this
Christian reformer and administrator, scraps of legend from stray camel-
drivers, a letter from the Patriarch commanding them to pray blessings on
his labours--who could tell what advantage might not come to the Coptic
Church through him, a Christian! On the dull, torpid faces, light seemed
struggling to live for a moment, as David talked. It was as though
something in their meagre lives, which belonged to undeveloped feelings,
was fighting for existence--a light struggling to break through murky
veils of inexperience.

Later, in the still night, however--still, though air vibrated
everywhere, as though the desert breathed an ether which was to fill
men's veins with that which quieted the fret and fever of life's
disillusions and forgeries and failures--David's speech with Ebn Ezra Bey
was of a different sort. If, as it seems ever in the desert, an
invisible host of beings, once mortal, now immortal, but suspensive and
understanding, listened to the tale he unfolded, some glow of pity must
have possessed them; for it was an Iliad of herculean struggle against
absolute disaster, ending with the bitter news of his grandfather's
death. It was the story of AEdipus overcome by events too strong for
soul to bear. In return, as the stars wheeled on, and the moon stole to
the zenith, majestic and slow, Ebn Ezra offered to his troubled friend
only the philosophy of the predestinarian, mingled with the calm of the
stoic. But something antagonistic to his own dejection, to the Muslim's
fatalism, emerged from David's own altruism, to nerve him to hope and
effort still. His unconquerable optimism rose determinedly to the
surface, even as he summed up and related the forces working against him.

"They have all come at once," he said; "all the activities opposing me,
just as though they had all been started long ago at different points,