When he had said over the words as long as his parched throat would let him, he became quiet.  To his amazement, some new, strange peace had filled him.  He took it for the peace of death.  He was glad to think it was coming so gently—­like a kind mother soothing him to his last sleep.

His head on his arm, his whole tired body relaxing in this new restfulness, he opened his eyes and looked off to the south, idly scanning the horizon, his eyes level with the sandy plain.  Then something made him sit quickly up and stare intently, his bared head craning forward.  To the south, lying low, was a mass of light clouds, volatile, changing with opalescent lights as he looked.  A little to the left of these clouds, while his head was on the sand, he thought his eyes had detected certain squared lines.

Now he scanned the spot with a feverish eagerness.  At first there was only the endless empty blue.  Then, when his wonder was quite dead and he was about to lie down, there came a miracle of miracles,—­a vision in the clear blue of the sky.  And this time the lines were coherent.  He, the dying sinner, had caught, clearly and positively for one awful second in that sky, the flashing impression of a cross.  It faded as soon as it came, vanished while he gazed, leaving him in gasping, fainting wonder at the marvel.

And then, before he could think or question himself, the sky once more yielded its vision; again that image of a cross stayed for a second in his eyes, and this time he thought there were figures about it.  Some picture was trying to show itself to him.  Still reaching his body forward, gazing fearfully, his aroused body pulsing swiftly to the wonder of the thing, he began to pray again, striving to keep his excitement under.

“O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”

Slowly at first, it grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had been but a meaningless mass of line and colour.  Set on a hill were many low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground about them.  In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same material, a church-like building such as he had once seen in a picture, with a wooden cross at the top.  In an open square before this church were many moving persons strangely garbed, seeming to be Indians.  They surged for a moment about the door of the church, then parted to either side as if in answer to a signal, and he saw a procession of the same people coming with bowed heads, scourging themselves with short whips and thorned branches.  At their head walked a brown-cowled monk, holding aloft before him a small cross, attached by a chain to his waist.  As he led the procession forward, another crowd, some of them being other brown-cowled monks, parted before the church door, and there, clearly before his wondering eyes was erected a great cross upon which he saw the crucified Saviour.