Of course, he carefully prepares his scenery to give a true semblance to the whole.  Karshish comes up the flinty pass from Jericho; he is attacked by thieves twice and beaten, and the wild beasts endanger his path;

    A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear,
    Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls;
    I cried and threw my staff and he was gone,

and then, at the end of the pass, he met Lazarus.  See how vividly the scenery is realised—­

    I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
    Like an old lion’s cheek-teeth.  Out there came
    A moon made like a face with certain spots,
    Multiform, manifold and menacing: 
    Then a wind rose behind me.  So we met
    In this old sleepy town at unaware
    The man and I.

And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had something to do with the strange impression the man has made on him.  Then we are placed in the dreamy village of Bethany.  We hear of its elders, its diseases, its flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which may help medicine—­

                There is a spider here
    Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
    Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back;

and then, how the countryside is all on fire with news of Vespasian marching into Judaea.  So we have the place, the village, the hills, the animals, and the time, all clear, and half of the character of Karshish.  The inner character of the man emerges as clearly when he comes to deal with Lazarus.  This is not a case of the body, he thinks, but of the soul.  “The Syrian,” he tells his master, “has had catalepsy, and a learned leech of his nation, slain soon afterwards, healed him and brought him back to life after three days.  He says he was dead, and made alive again, but that is his madness; though the man seems sane enough.  At any rate, his disease has disappeared, he is as well as you and I. But the mind and soul of the man, that is the strange matter, and in that he is entirely unlike other men.  Whatever he has gone through has rebathed him as in clear water of another life, and penetrated his whole being.  He views the world like a child, he scarcely listens to what goes on about him, yet he is no fool.  If one could fancy a man endowed with perfect knowledge beyond the fleshly faculty, and while he has this heaven in him forced to live on earth, such a man is he.  His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.  He has lost all sense of our values of things.  Vespasian besieging Jerusalem and a mule passing with gourds awaken the same interest.  But speak of some little fact, little as we think, and he stands astonished with its prodigious import.  If his child sicken to death it does not seem to matter to him, but a gesture, a glance from the child, starts him into an agony of fear and anger, as if the child were undoing the universe.  He lives like one between two regions, one of distracting glory, of which he