Alexander Jardine, standing at the edge of the emerald, watched it.  He could not sleep.  The first nights in the Garland he with the others had slept profoundly.  But now there was recuperation, strength again.  Around swept the circle of the desert.  Above him he saw Canopus.

He ceased to look directly at the moon, or the desert, or Canopus.  He stretched himself upon the clear sand and was back in the inner vast that searched for the upper vast.  Since the grasses of the Campagna there had been a long search, and his bark had encountered many a wind, head winds and favoring winds, and had beaten from coast to coast.

“O God, for the open, divine sea and Wisdom the compass—­”

He lay beneath the palm; he put his arm over his eyes.  For an hour he had been whelmed in an old sense, bitter and stately, of the woe, the broken knowledge, the ailing and the pain of the world.  All the world....  That other caravan, where was it?...  Where were all caravans?  And all the bewilderment and all the false hopes and all the fool’s paradises.  All the crying in the night.  Children....

Little by little he recognized that he was seeing it as panorama....  None saw a panorama until one was out of the plane of its components—­out of the immediate plane.  Gotten out as all must get out, by the struggling Thought, which, the thing done, uses its eyes....

He looked at his past.  He did not beat his breast nor cry out in repentance, but he saw with a kind of wonder the plains of darkness.  Oh, the deserts, and the slow-moving caravans in them!

He lay very still beneath the palm.  All the world.... All.

“All is myself.”

“Ian?  Myself—­myself—­myself!”

He heard a step upon the sand—­the putting by of a branch.  The Sufi Abdallah stood beside him.  Alexander made a movement.

“Lie still,” said the other, “I will sit here, for sweet is the night.”  He took his place, white-robed, a gleaming upon the sand.  Silent almost always, it was nothing that he should sit silent now, quiet, moveless, gone away apparently among the stars.

The moments dropped, each a larger round.  Glenfernie moved, sat up.

“I’ve felt you and your calm in our caravaning.  Let me see if my Arabic will carry me here!—­What have you that I have not and that I long for?”

“I have nought that you have not.”

“But you see the having, and I do not.”

“You are beginning to see.”

The wind breathed in the oasis palms.  The earth turned, seeking the sun for her every chamber, the earth made pilgrimage around the sun, eying point after point of that excellence, the earth journeyed with the sun, held by the invisible cords.

“I wish new sight—­I wish new touch—­I wish comprehension!”

“You are beginning to have it.”

“I have more than I had....  Yes, I know it—­”

“There is birth....  Then comes the joy of birth.  At last comes the knowledge of why there is joy.  Strive to be fully born.”