“Little fool,” he said, “fortune is kind to you!  You have escaped from the big trap of life.  What?  You are crying for help?  You are still in the trap?  Then I must go down to you, little fool, for I am a fool too.  But why I must do it, I know no more than you know.”

He lowered himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found the creature with its leg broken and bleeding.  It was not a sheep but a young goat.  He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his turban and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal.  Then he climbed back to the path and strode on at the head of his flock, carrying the little black kid in his arms.

There were houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy bees.  As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they wondered who was passing so late.  One of them, in a house where there was no mill but many lights, came to the door and looked out laughing, her face and bosom bare.

But the sad shepherd did not stay.  His long shadow and the confused mass of lesser shadows behind him drifted down the white moonlight, past the yellow bars of lamplight that gleamed from the doorways.  It seemed as if he were bound to go somewhere and would not delay.

Yet with all his haste to be gone, it was plain that he thought little of where he was going.  For when he came to the foot of the valley, where the paths divided, he stood between them staring vacantly, without a desire to turn him this way or that.  The imperative of choice halted him like a barrier.  The balance of his mind hung even because both scales were empty.  He could act, he could go, for his strength was untouched; but he could not choose, for his will was broken within him.

The path to the left went up toward the little town of Bethlehem, with huddled roofs and walls in silhouette along the double-crested hill.  It was dark and forbidding as a closed fortress.  The sad shepherd looked at it with indifferent eyes; there was nothing there to draw him.  The path to the right wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the Dead Sea.  But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two away, the smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of a cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak.  There the great cone was cut squarely off, and the levelled summit was capped by a palace of marble, with round towers at the corners and flaring beacons along the walls; and the glow of an immense fire, hidden in the central court-yard, painted a false dawn in the eastern sky.  All down the clean-cut mountain slopes, on terraces and blind arcades, the lights flashed from lesser pavilions and pleasure-houses.