CHAPTER III

A stranger was riding a lazy camel across the lonely Arabian desert.
All men are Moors in the dark, but this man was a Moor in the
starlight. A newly discovered star brought the man from the banks of
the Indus. He consulted all the calendars of the East, but none could
tell him about the star. Balthasar, however, was not the man to let
the strange, incomprehensible star escape him. Nothing can be
concealed in God's bosom from an Eastern scholar, for not even God
Himself has a passport for the land of the all-wise. The world is
through them alone and for them alone; man must grow of himself towards
the light as the lotus grows out of the mud. So thought Balthasar, and
felt that life was a failure.

In such wisdom the faith of Orientals lives and moves and has its
being. If man honestly aspires to higher things and tortures his
flesh, it may go better with him in another life. For he must be born
again many times, and must torture his body until it shrivels up, is
freed from sin, and is without desires. Then the soul is released and
is not born again, for Nirvana, the last goal, is reached. Only bad
men continue to live. The nations of India had been demoralised by
that doctrine for centuries. But it did not satisfy wise men.
Balthasar thought: If a man starves through a few dozen lives, then
something good must come out of it. Or is evil good enough to
continue, and good evil enough to cease? Balthasar sought better
counsel. He sought throughout the universe for a peg on which to hang
a new, more beneficial philosophy of life. When, then, he saw the new