There is a purpose of God in this city, but there is as much purpose in the desert.  There is no astonishingly great purpose.  The disease will work itself out.  And I know God’s whole truth to man was revealed long since, and any one of calm soul may know it.  The hope of learning the purpose through the ages, the following of the gleam, is the preoccupation of the insane.

What do all these people and this black city want to make of her?  She, and ten thousand like her, need life.  Life, not thought, or progress, just the same old human life that has always been going on.

The rain was pouring heavily and I took shelter.  I felt calmer; I had unpacked myself of words.  Rather mournfully I now looked out into the night, and, as it were, ceased to speak to it, and became a listener.  A song of sorrow came from the city, the wailing of mothers uncomforted, of children orphaned, uncared for, of forsaken ones.  I heard again the old reproach of the children sitting in the market.  “Here surely,” I said, “where so many are gathered together, there is more solitude and lonely grief than in all the wide places of the earth!” Voices came up to me from thousands in a city where thousands of hands were uplifted to take a cup of comfort that cannot be vouchsafed.

Is there a way out for her?  Is there a way out for them?  “For her perhaps, for them not,” something whispered within me inexorably.  “And Death?” The wind caught up the whisper “death” caressingly and took it away from me over the city, and wove it in and out through all the streets and all the dark lanes, and about the little chimneys, and the windows.

Is there a way out for her?—­Perhaps.  There are some beings so full of life that even the glutton Death must disgorge them.

III

THE LITTLE DEAD CHILD

In the little town of Gagri on the Caucasian shore of the Black Sea there is a beautiful and wonderful church surviving from the sixth century, a work of pristine Christianity.  It is but the size of a cottage, and just the shape of a child’s Noah’s Ark, but made of great rough-hewn blocks of grey stone.  One comes upon the building unexpectedly.  After looking at Gagri’s ancient ruins, her fortresses, her wall built by Mithridates, one sees suddenly in a shadowy close six sorrowful little cypresses standing absolutely still—­like heavily dressed guardsmen—­and behind the cypresses and their dark green brooms, the grey wall of the church, solid, eternal.  One’s eyes rest upon it as upon a perfect resting-place.  If Gagri has an organic life, this church must be its beating heart.

I came to Gagri one Saturday afternoon after the first two hundred and fifty miles tramping of my pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and at this little church I witnessed a strange sight.  I had hardly admired the grey interior, the bare walls growing into the roof in unbroken curves, the massive stone rood-screen, the sorrowful faces in the holy pictures, when a little procession filed into the church; four girls carrying a flower-bedecked coffin, half a dozen elders, and a pack of children carrying candles—­a sight at once terrible and diurnal, a child’s funeral.