You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how they
travelled from far away to offer their gifts at the manger-cradle in
Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who
also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not
arrive with his brethren in the presence of the young child Jesus? Of
the great desire of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet
accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the probations of
his soul; of the long way of his seeking, and the strange way of his
finding, the One whom he sought--I would tell the tale as I have heard
fragments of it in the Hall of Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of
Man.




THE SIGN IN THE SKY


In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod
reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Ecbatana, among the
mountains of Persia, a certain man named Artaban, the Median. His house
stood close to the outermost of the seven walls which encircled the
royal treasury. From his roof he could look over the rising battlements
of black and white and crimson and blue and red and silver and gold, to
the hill where the summer palace of the Parthian emperors glittered like
a jewel in a sevenfold crown.

Around the dwelling of Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers
and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the
slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all