“Salvation is within you. The Kingdom of God is within you.” Dorotheus, hermit in the desert, kneeling in his cave mouth from two hours past midnight to sunrise, said that five thousand times, said it at last with an even sound like the clacking of a mill, the droning of bees or the voice of locusts. The east grew rosy, the sand ridges translucent, marvellously hued; up rushed the fiery sun. Dorotheus rose from his knees, took the scourge and plied it. Having done that, he next soberly got breakfast—a handful of dates, a small piece of bread broken from a long, twisted loaf, gift of the last pilgrim making round of the anchorites scattered in the desert, a measure of water from the jar in the corner. As he ate he looked across the intervening sand to the very small oasis where he cultivated a garden. The palms moved in the morning wind, tufts of green feathers cutting the absolute blue. It seemed the only motion in the world, unless it were the moving, too, of scant tufts of desert grass immediately about this cave that was no true cave but one of many ancient excavations, made, God knew how long ago, by idolatrous Pharaohs, building tombs to their own reproach!
The oasis was uninhabited save by a few birds and some small and wary four-footed and creeping life. There now came from it, having done his own foraging through the night, the jackal that Dorotheus had found, wounded and separated from the pack, and had tamed, naming it Arla{293} after his birthplace on the Danube. Arla trotted across the sand, rubbed himself like a dog against his master, wagged his tail, was talked with, and at last went off to the depth of the cave, to lie there out of heat and light and sleep until the pleasant dusk came again. Dorotheus uncovered with reverence, took from its shelf with clean hands the Book of the Gospels which was the cave’s precious possession, took, and kneeling read the parable of the wheat and the tares. When it was done, he prayed, stretched flat before a great wooden cross fastened to the cave wall. That also done, he rose, took up the palm mat that he was weaving, and with a heap of palm fronds beside him, sat again in the opening of the cave.
This time he faced from the oasis to the wider spread of the desert, two leagues of sand waves between him and the monastery in whose laura, or circle of hermitages, this cavern was numbered. He with other anchorites wove palm mats and baskets. At intervals came monks, gathering up what was done and taking to the monastery, whence all were sent in trade to the nearest city. Dorotheus’s fingers, that at first had been unskilful at the work, moved now with the precisest ease. Born thirty-six years before upon the Danube, of Christian parents, educated in Italy, in Verona, a soldier under Odoacer, King of Italy, left for dead on the field of Soissons, captive among the Franks, maker of a daring escape, wanderer in Spain, recipient one night of a dazzling vision, turning to the Church, catechumen, baptized, crossing to Africa, wanderer there through dangers and strange adventures, monk at last and ascetic—he had now woven palm mats for six years, woven palm mats and made his garden and walked the desert up and down.{294}
Fast and vigil and discipline had made him lean but not emaciated, deep-eyed but not dim-eyed. In the desert were all manner of hermits, and some lived but to torture themselves, and some through long disuse of mind were nigh mindless. There were others who were “moderates.” Dorotheus was of these. The greater reputation clung to the self-torturers, the chained to rocks, the unsleeping, uneating, the ever-scourging, the sealed-eyes, the drawers-back from water. To most in this time these seemed the more saintly. They were the great seers of visions, hearers of voices, wrestlers with d?mons, workers of miracles.
Perhaps Dorotheus, too, aspired to saintship, but found it not wholly upon that road. Ascetic, he yet rested human. He abode in the desert, a man of strong frame, tawny-haired, supple-fingered, with a working and a questing mind and a soul that was learning itself. For a long time he had had a life of outward adventure; now he was adventuring inward.
The sun rode high, the desert swam in heat. The sun went to the west. Dorotheus put by the mat, ate again sparingly of the bread and dates, drank of the water, then taking a hoe that he had fashioned for himself crossed the glaring sand to the oasis.
Here was neither heat nor glare, but shade rich and sweet, shade, and cool sliding water, and upon the side opposed to his cave the little garden like a sliver of Paradise, that he had made for the love of making. Dorotheus applied himself to hoeing the earth about the roots of vines which he had procured from the monastery vineyard. The grapes hung down, green yet, but when they were ripe he did not propose to eat them, nor yet to press{295} wine from them. The birds would eat them, the birds and Arla the jackal.
Looking east, between the palm stems, he saw the desert waves, low and high, like coloured, solidified water, saw his own cave and the expanse beyond, and far on the horizon a smudge which would be the palms of the great oasis that held the monastery. When in his hoeing he turned, there rose before him, back wall to his garden, a small forest of palms with other trees and shrubs and linking creepers. You could not see far into it: almost at once a green gloom shut down. For reasons he had never pierced it.
It might be a quarter-mile through to the western edge of the oasis, and to the desert waves on that side, low and high, like coloured, solidified water. And thence it might be two leagues and more to the palms and the springs in the desert where was builded the convent village of St. Agatha, dwelled in by a thousand nuns. And the laura of St. Agatha, the circle of her women anchorites, swinging out into the desert, touched at its far eastern point, as the laura of the monastery, swinging into the desert, touched at its far western point, the little oasis and those ridges of desert stone, long since dug into by vanished kings. And eastward from the green islet the hermit Dorotheus had his cave, and westward from it the hermit Dorothea had hers. Between them was the oasis, and each made a garden upon the edge facing his or her cavern. And between the gardens was the quarter-mile of thickly growing palms and other trees, of green gloom and netting creepers, and no track across, made by nature, or by man or woman. The quarter-mile might as well have been the diameter of the globe.{296}
But not quite so. Each hermit, wandering in the desert that swept around the watered hand’s-breadth, had taken the other’s presence in gleams and intimations. Perhaps each had seen the other afar; perhaps from some sand crest each had marked the other digging in a garden. Perhaps through the wilderness between had come perceptions of human neighbourhood. Each had knowledge that two hermitages bordered this green spot in the desert—his own and a woman’s, her own and a man’s. Perhaps other threads of light, quiverings, vibrations, travelled to and fro by roads beneath and above all usual consciousness. But there was no such contact as is customary between neighbours pledged to one mode of life, and dwelling but a quarter-mile apart, no friendly passing of the time of day, no exchange of the fruits of the garden, no deeper converse and gifts of ideas. There was no close contact, no near vision nor speech together at all.
The two, man and woman, dwelled in caves beside fruit trees and cool water, and were weavers of palm mats and makers of gardens by virtue of being “moderates”—rather, in the eyes of the sixth century, a deplorable weakness than any virtue! Your true ascetic from the bone outward, your unadulterate hermit-saint, your anchorite with never a Laodicean smirch, abhorred oases!—These two, monk and nun, were, then, “moderates.” Nevertheless, for the man to have gazed, free-willed, upon the woman, and for the woman to have gazed, free-willed, upon the man, and for the two to have stood and talked, that by either, pledged to God, and walking the sixth century, would have been taken to slant toward the unpardonable sin.
Dorotheus hoed the earth around his vines, and then he{297} tended orange trees, citron and pomegranate. The sun rode low, and the palms cast hugely long shadows. The sun touched the horizon, and the sand turned into rose-coloured glass. Arla the jackal came out of his den, stretched and shook himself, then trotted over the sand to the water, slipping beneath the trees. Dorotheus, too, kneeled by the water and drank. Then he shouldered his hoe and he and the jackal went up the sand slope to the cave. As they went they heard distantly the bell that was fastened about the neck of the goat that had followed the hermit Dorothea from St. Agatha. And at the turn of the night, when he waked, he heard through the thin, desert air, the crowing of a cock which she had bought with palm baskets from some desert vagrant.
The day of Dorothea had been much like the day of Dorotheus. Details might differ, but essentials did not. Before cockcrow she kneeled upon the sand before the cave, she lay upon her face and prayed. “Salvation is from within.... The Kingdom of God is within you.... O God, let the Kingdom dawn!” prayed Dorothea. When she rose the east was a pearl, and all the desert sand a pearl, and the trees of the oasis grey pearl above a rope of mist. She took the scourge of cords and used it, laid it by and prayed again, “O God, the long pilgrimage through the desert!—O God, let me lift and cleave to Thee!” Sunrise brightened the sand, gave its poised waves a thousand hues, then up came the red globe, and the day, or short or long, was here. Dorothea got her breakfast—a few raisins, a little bread, a measure of water from the jar in the corner. Across the sand, at the edge of the oasis, the goat Even I cropped its meal, and the cock Welcome strutted and clapped its wings. Dorothea was so “moderate” that she smiled to{298} see them both. Likewise her moderation was such that both the cave and she herself were clean.
The nun as well as the monk had a Book of the Gospels, the Acts and the Epistles. Her cell, as his cell, had fastened to the wall a great wooden cross. Dorothea, standing before the sloping shelf upon which it was laid, read the first pages of the Gospel of Saint John, then stretched herself upon the rocky floor before the cross. “In the beginning.... O Light that shineth in darkness—”
She, also, wove palm mats and baskets; she, also, across the sand, at the edge of the oasis that faced her cell, made a garden. Her morning rites performed, she crossed the glaring sand to the shadow of the palms. She wished water to reach a spot that was more arid than it should be, and she dug with a spade, which she had begged from the convent, a canal through which it might flow. She worked with strength and expertness where at first she had worked weakly and unskilfully. Practice in digging, as in other things, was like a waking memory....
This was her birthday. She was thirty-four years old.... She saw the house in Alexandria in which she was born, and the wealthy Claudius, her father, vaunting his marble statues, his gems, and his descent from Vigilius and Eudocia, martyred in Rome three hundred years ago, and her mother Verina, a fair-haired, silent woman, born across the middle sea, of a Roman father and a barbarian mother, and the nurse Anna with her endless story-telling, merry and sad, and other house slaves for whom she felt fondness, and her teachers Sylvanus and old Hipparchus.
Upon her knees she took out the black earth with her hands and heaped it in a wide basket. The cock Welcome pecked after her, and the bell of Even I made not far away a{299} rhythmic sound.... All her old, Alexandrian, gay companions when she passed from the schoolroom to the world. Alexandrian life—Alexandrian life.... The daughter of Claudius—the daughter of Claudius....
The trench that she was making was growing deeper. She worked with strong, sweeping, ordered movements. Behind her stood the thickly growing palms and netting vines of that undisturbed belt between her garden and the garden of the hermit Dorotheus.... She found that without conscious thought she had turned so that the barrier wood was before her. She was sitting back upon her heels, the spade lying idle beside her, and she was gazing through the wood. What was a quarter-mile of tree-thronged space?... The daughter of Claudius—the daughter of Claudius....
She sprang to her feet, left the garden and went back to the cave. She opened again the book upon its shelf and read, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day, not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.” She closed the book, took the basket she was weaving and sat with it in the cave mouth. Alexandria ... and all the crises of her life there—Claudius’s daughter—Claudius’s daughter! She wove the palm shreds in and out. Her fingers had been trained in fine work and upon the lute—she wove the basket very skilfully. Perhaps, in practising, she remembered, too, how one made baskets. At any rate, now she had been digging in the earth of this oasis, now she had been making palm baskets, now she had fasted, watched{300} and prayed, hermit in this cave, for four torrid summers and four winters of balm. Thirty-four to-day. “Lord, Lord, let me not think of me and my years—”
At sunset she heard the jackal bark. Had she not heard it she would have been startled, so much was its voice a part of this disk of earth she lived upon. She expected it as Dorotheus, on the other side of the oasis, listened for the bell of Even I and the crowing of the cock Welcome. He did not know their names, nor she that the jackal was named Arla. From pilgrims going the round of the desert anchorites each had gained knowledge that the oasis stood between the cells of the hermit Dorothea and the hermit Dorotheus. Each knew that the other was “moderate,” not bitterly, keenly, marvellously ascetic. Each knew how he—how she—disappointed the pilgrims.
Night in the desert was a lovely thing. The daughter of Claudius lay and admired—the daughter of Verina gave mystic meanings to the large bright stars and the ebony and ivory of the sand—the nursling of Anna heard the palm tops telling stories—the pupil of old Hipparchus heard again read Plotinus and Porphyry—the Christian nun thought, “If it were healed how lovely were the world!” She slept, till Welcome waked her with his crowing.
However rapidly might move the hermit’s inner world, however packed and thronged the spiritual time, outwardly one desert hour, one desert day, was highly like another. Nor did the inner world move always swiftly, smoothly, and into spiritual time came dry seasons. The desert disease was listlessness, attacking body and mind, listlessness, and strange spells of homesickness and of craving for red pottage.... The regimen for that was the scourge and prayer.{301}
Dorotheus thought that what came upon him was that listlessness. He had known it before, and the homesickness and the craving for red pottage, known them and valorously fought them, as witnessed scars upon his shoulders no less than strong wrestlings in prayer stored up—somewhere. These moods did not come so often now, and he was prepared to fight them when they came. But this time, do what he would, the listlessness clung. Moreover, he began to see d?mons. He forced himself to work in the garden, though his arms trembled, and the palm trees seemed to be walking to and fro. Then came common sense in a flash. “And I have seen soldiers by the hundred take fever—!” But immediately upon that he merely saw and heard d?mons again; moreover, he grew heated and began to break down the vines and the bushes, “do nothing” having given place to “do everything.” He would carry the palm grove up to the cave, then there would be no hot sand to cross!
Dorothea studied the four Gospels and prayed, stretched before the cross. She worked at basket-making, and finished the ditch in the garden that carried the water where she would. When the sun began to sink she walked in the desert, she and her long shadow on the sand. Even I and the cock would stay by the grass and the black earth and the water.
As she turned, Arla the jackal came out of the oasis. Welcome, much alarmed, took to a tree, the bell of Even I began to jangle. But Arla left them both alone and went straight to Dorothea. He was only a greyish-yellow, sizable, part dog, part wolf, and she presently saw that there was no wolf to-day. “Dog, dog! what is it?” she asked.{302}
Arla went from her toward the palms, came back and pulled at her robe. “What is it? What has happened?” But he could not tell her, could only tell that something had happened, and that she should come with him. After awhile, she, being “moderate,” went.
Dark was now rushing over the desert. The oasis belt, through which she had never gone, was darker than dark, thick with tree and bush and vine, uneven-floored, with sudden threads and pools of water. Small, living things rustled and scampered. Arla went through easily; the hermit behind him now struck against trees, now stumbled and fell. But some old ease of movement through woodland coming up from the very deep past, she followed on through the dark.
The palms thinned and they came into what she recognized must be the other hermit’s garden, then they stepped out of the oasis. Here was the star-roofed desert, and a slope of sand to such a ridge as that in which she had he............