* * * * *

Only a half-day in New York on the way down to Equatoria, or the alternative of waiting over a ship, meaning eight days later with Captain Carreras.  Bedient could not bring his mind to the latter delay at this stage of the journey, though the metropolis called to him amazingly.  Here he had been born; and here was the setting of many early memories, now seen through a kind of faery dusk.  With but an hour or so in lower Manhattan, he swept in impressions like a panorama-film, his mind held to no single thought for more than an instant.  The finest outer integument had never been worn from his nerves, so that nothing of the pandemonium distressed; but what his oriental training called the illusion of it all—­really dismayed.  It seemed as if the millions were locked in some terrible slavery, which they did not fully understand, only that they must hurry, and never cease the devouring toil.  In the hideous walled cities of China, the same thought had often come to Bedient—­that these myriads had been condemned by the sins of their past lives, blindly to gather together and maim each others’ souls.

Still there was some big meaning for him in New York.  Bedient realized that sooner or later he would return.  Toward the end of the afternoon, as he looked back from the deck of the Dryden steamer Hatteras, he realized that New York had dazed him; that something of the grand gloom, something of the granite, had entered his heart.  Perhaps it was well for him to have these glimpses, and to hurry away to adjust himself in the silence—­before he took up his place in New York again.

A week later the Hatteras awaited dawn, sixty miles off the northern coast of Equatoria.  Treacherous coral reefs extend that far out to sea, and the lights of the passage into port are few.  This is an ugly part of the Caribbean in high seas.  Moreover, the coral has a way of changing its ramifications; its spires build rapidly in the warm surface water.

All the forenoon the liner crawled in toward the harbor, and at last through the blazing noon, Bedient saw Coral City in a foreground of palm-decked hills.  Certain fresh-tinned roofs close to the water-front reflected the sun like a burning-glass.  Nearer still, a few white buildings on the seaward slopes shone through the heat haze with the vividness of jewels—­whitened walls gleaming among the palms and colorful turrets of pure Spanish line.  The strip of beach, white as a road of shells, lost itself on either side of the city in its own dazzling light.  Films of heat danced upon the painted roofs.  The sky was a blinding azure that tranced the hills and harbor with its brilliance, silence and magic.