* * * * *

The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it down His face.

He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the violet haze of the falling twilight.

“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?”

The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across again.

“That among the palms, Holiness?”

“Yes.”

“That is Megiddo,” he said.  “Some call it Armageddon.”

CHAPTER II

I

At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias.  Nearly two hours previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the messenger was a little late.

These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the world—­a slip of useless country—­and it was necessary for a man to ride from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran to the Pope, and to return with correspondence.  It was a dangerous task, and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook it by turns.  In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent, could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the twenty-four hours.

It was a brilliant moonlit night.  The great golden shield was riding high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the house-door—­casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and there sparkled up the stony pathway.  Compared with this clear splendour, the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing; and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to it.

This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life.  For him there were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master.  It was an immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar.  As regarded the movements of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of the waves far beneath.  Of course the world was restless, he half perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless until they found their rest in God. Quare fremuerunt gentes?...  Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus! As to the end—­he was not greatly concerned.