It was in the late spring of the year 375 that Simon came out from his
cell, his gourd in his hand, to draw water from the spring. Darkness
had closed in, the sun had set, but one last glimmer of rosy light
rested upon a rocky peak, which jutted forth from the hill, on the
further side from the hermit's dwelling. As Simon came forth from under
his ledge, the gourd dropped from his hand, and he stood gazing in
amazement.

On the opposite peak a man was standing, his outline black in the fading
light. He was a strange almost a deformed figure, short-statured,
round-backed, with a large head, no neck, and a long rod jutting out
from between his shoulders. He stood with his face advanced, and his
body bent, peering very intently over the plain to the westward.
In a moment he was gone, and the lonely black peak showed up hard and
naked against the faint eastern glimmer. Then the night closed down,
and all was black once more.

Simon Melas stood long in bewilderment, wondering who this stranger
could be. He had heard, as had every Christian, of those evil spirits
which were wont to haunt the hermits in the Thebaid and on the skirts of
the Ethiopian waste. The strange shape of this solitary creature, its
dark outline and prowling, intent attitude, suggestive rather of a
fierce, rapacious beast than of a man, all helped him to believe that he
had at last encountered one of those wanderers from the pit, of whose
existence, in those days of robust faith, he had no more doubt than of
his own. Much of the night he spent in prayer, his eyes glancing
continually at the low arch of his cell door, with its curtain of deep
purple wrought with stars. At any instant some crouching monster, some
homed abomination, might peer in upon him; and he clung with frenzied
appeal to his crucifix, as his human weakness quailed at the thought.