Suddenly, through the shadow thrown by the overhanging wood, which stretches far into endless depths, a human form appears.  It is a woman.  She advances slowly towards the ruins.  She has reached them.  She treads the once sacred ground.  This woman is pale, her look sad, her long robe floats on the wind, her feet covered with dust.  She walks with difficulty and pain.  A block of stone is placed near the stream, almost at the foot of the statue of John the Baptist.  Upon this stone she sinks breathless and exhausted, worn out with fatigue.  And yet, for many days, many years, many centuries, she has walked on unwearied.

For the first time, she feels an unconquerable sense of lassitude.  For the first time, her feet begin to fail her.  For the first time, she, who traversed, with firm and equal footsteps, the moving lava of torrid deserts, while whole caravans were buried in drifts of fiery sand—­who passed, with steady and disdainful tread, over the eternal snows of Arctic regions, over icy solitudes, in which no other human being could live—­who had been spared by the devouring flames of conflagrations, and by the impetuous waters of torrents—­she, in brief, who for centuries had had nothing in common with humanity—­for the first time suffers mortal pain.

Her feet bleed, her limbs ache with fatigue, she is devoured by burning thirst.  She feels these infirmities, yet scarcely dares to believe them real.  Her joy would be too immense!  But now, her throat becomes dry, contracted, all on fire.  She sees the stream, and throws herself on her knees, to quench her thirst in that crystal current, transparent as a mirror.  What happens then?  Hardly have her fevered lips touched the fresh, pure water, than, still kneeling, supported on her hands, she suddenly ceases to drink, and gazes eagerly on the limpid stream.  Forgetting the thirst which devours her, she utters a loud cry—­a cry of deep, earnest, religious joy, like a note of praise and infinite gratitude to heaven.  In that deep mirror, she perceives that she has grown older.

In a few days, a few hours, a few minutes, perhaps in a single second, she has attained the maturity of age.  She, who for more than eighteen centuries has been as a woman of twenty, carrying through successive generations the load of her imperishable youth—­she has grown old, and may, perhaps, at length, hope to die.  Every minute of her life may now bring her nearer to the last home!  Transported by that ineffable hope, she rises, and lifts her eyes to heaven, clasping her hands in an attitude of fervent prayer.  Then her eyes rest on the tall statue of stone, representing St. John.  The head, which the martyr carries in his hand, seems, from beneath its half-closed granite eyelid, to cast upon the Wandering Jewess a glance of commiseration and pity.  And it was she, Herodias who, in the cruel intoxication of a pagan festival, demanded the murder of the saint!  And it is at the foot of the martyr’s image, that, for the first time, the immortality, which weighed on her for so many centuries, seems likely to find a term!