Snowford rose, staggering a little.

“I may as well tell the guard now,” he said.  “Then we need not be interrupted again.”

CHAPTER VI

I

The Syrian awoke from a dream that a myriad faces were looking into his own, eager, attentive and horrible, in his corner of the roof-top, and sat up sweating and gasping aloud for breath.  For an instant he thought that he was really dying, and that the spiritual world was about him.  Then, as he struggled, sense came back, and he stood up, drawing long breaths of the stifling night air.

Above him the sky was as the pit, black and empty; there was not a glimmer of light, though the moon was surely up.  He had seen her four hours before, a red sickle, swing slowly out from Thabor.  Across the plain, as he looked from the parapet, there was nothing.  For a few yards there lay across the broken ground a single crooked lance of light from a half-closed shutter; and beneath that, nothing.  To the north again, nothing; to the west a glimmer, pale as a moth’s wing, from the house-roofs of Nazareth; to the east, nothing.  He might be on a tower-top in space, except for that line of light and that grey glimmer that evaded the eye.

On the roof, however, it was possible to make out at least outlines, for the dormer trap had been left open at the head of the stairs, and from somewhere within the depths of the house there stole up a faint refracted light.

There was a white bundle in that corner; that would be the pillow of the Benedictine abbot.  He had seen him lay himself down there some time—­was it four hours or four centuries ago?  There was a grey shape stretched along that pale wall—­the Friar, he thought; there were other irregular outlines breaking the face of the parapet, here and there along the sides.

Very softly, for he knew the caprices of sleep, he stepped across the paved roof to the opposite parapet and looked over, for there yet hung about him a desire for reassurance that he was still in company with flesh and blood.  Yes, indeed he was still on earth; for there was a real and distinct light burning among the tumbled rocks, and beside it, delicate as a miniature, the head and shoulders of a man, writing.  And in the circle of light were other figures, pale, broken patches on which men lay; a pole or two, erected with the thought of a tent to follow; a little pile of luggage with a rug across it; and beyond the circle other outlines and shapes faded away into the stupendous blackness.

Then the writing man moved his head, and a monstrous shadow fled across the ground; a yelp as of a strangling dog broke out suddenly close behind him, and, as he turned, a moaning figure sat up on the roof, sobbing itself awake.  Another moved at the sound, and then as, sighing, the former relapsed heavily against the wall, once more the priest went back to his place, still doubtful as to the reality of all that he saw, and the breathless silence came down again as a pall.