and walked up over the pavement between the lights, and the groups
of feasters. All looked round at him; a few threw him ribald
words; but none ventured to stop his progress. A few, women
chiefly, I could see, shuddered as he passed them by, as though a
wintry chill had come over them; and in the end he walked up and
stood in front of Phorenice's divan, and gazed fixedly on her, but
without making obeisance.

He was a frail old man, with white hair tumbling on his
shoulders, and ragged white beard. The mud of wayfaring hung in
clots on his feet and legs. His wizened body was bare save for a
single cloth wound about his shoulders and his loins, and he
carried in his hand a wand with the symbol of our Lord the Sun
glowing at its tip. That wand went to show his caste, but in no
other way could I recognize him.

I took him for one of those ascetics of the Priests' Clan, who
had forsworn the steady nurtured life of the Sacred Mountain, and
who lived out in the dangerous lands amongst the burning hills,
where there is daily peril from falling rocks, from fire streams,
from evil vapours, from sudden fissuring of the ground, and from
other movements of those unstable territories, and from the greater
lizards and other monstrous beasts which haunt them. These keep
constant in the memory the might of the Holy Gods, and the
insecurity of this frail earth on which we have our resting-place,
and so the sojourners there become chastened in the spirit, and
gain power over mysteries which even the most studious and learned
of other men can never hope to attain.

A silence filled the room when the old man came to his halt,