It is my belief that that larger Self whom they will call protecting Saint or heavenly Guardian takes hand in affairs oftener than we think!  Leaving the Palos road, I went to the sea as I had done yesterday and again sat under heaped sand with about me a sere grass through which the wind whined.  At first it whined and then it sang in a thin, outlandish voice.  Sitting thus, I might have looked toward Africa, but I knew now that I was not going to Africa.  Often, perhaps, in the unremembered past I had been in Africa; often, doubtless, in ages to come its soil would be under my foot, but now I was not going there!  To-day I looked westward over River-Ocean, unknown to our fathers and unknown to ourselves.  It was unknown as the future of the world.

Ocean piled before me.  From where I lay it seemed to run uphill to one pale line, nor blue nor white, set beneath the solid gray.  Over that hilltop, what?  Only other hills and plains, water, endlessly water, until the waves, so much mightier than waves of that blue sea we knew best, should beat at last against Asia shore!  So high, so deep, so vast, so real, yet so empty-seeming save for strange dangers!  No sails over the hilltop; no sails in all that Vast save close at hand where mariners held to the skirts of Mother.  Europe.  Ocean vast, Ocean black, Ocean unknown.  Yet there, too, life and the knowing of life ran somehow continuous.

It wiled me from my smaller self.  How had we all suffered, we the whole earth!  But we were moving, we the world with none left out, moving toward That which held worlds, which was conscious above worlds.  Long the journey, long the adventure, but it was not worth while fearing, it was not worth while whining!  I was not alone Jayme de Marchena, nor Juan Lepe, nor this name nor that nor the other.

There was now a great space of quiet in my mind.  Suddenly formed there the face and figure of Don Enrique de Cerda whose life I had had the good hap to save.  He was far away with the Queen and King who beleaguered Granada.  I had not seen him for ten years.  A moment before he had rested among the host of figures in the unevenly lighted land of memory.  Now he stood forth plainly and seemed to smile.

I took the leading.  With the inner eye I have seen lines of light like subtle shining cords running between persons.  Such a thread stretched now between me and Enrique de Cerda.  I determined to make my way, as Juan Lepe, through the mountains and over the plain of Granada to Santa Fe.

CHAPTER II

Set will to an end and promptly eyes open to means!  I did not start for Granada from Palos but from Huelva, and I quitted Andalusia as a porter in a small merchant train carrying goods of sorts to Zarafa that was a mountain town taken from the Moors five years back.  I was to these folk Juan Lepe, a strong, middle-aged man used to ships but now for some reason tired of them.  My merchants