The next morning he was up at daybreak, and long before the sun had risen above the highest peak of Caucasus, he had departed from the Lars Monastery, leaving a handsome donation in the poor-box toward the various charitable works in which the brethren were engaged, such as the rescue of travellers lost in the snow, or the burial of the many victims murdered on or near the Pass of Dariel by the bands of fierce mountain robbers and assassins, that at certain seasons infest that solitary region.  Making the best of his way to the fortress of Passanaur, he there joined a party of adventurous Russian climbers who had just successfully accomplished the assent of Mount Kazbek, and in their company proceeded through the rugged Aragua valley to Tiflis, which he reached that same evening.  From this dark and dismal-looking town, shadowed on all sides by barren and cavernous hills, he dispatched the manuscript of his mysteriously composed poem, together with the letter concerning it, to his friend Villiers in England,—­and then, yielding to a burning sense of impatience within himself,—­ impatience that would brook no delay,—­he set out resolutely, and at once, on his long pilgrimage to the “land of sand and ruin and gold”—­the land of terrific prophecy and stern fulfilment,—­the land of mighty and mournful memories, where the slow river Euphrates clasps in its dusky yellow ring the ashes of great kingdoms fallen to rise no more.

CHAPTER VIII.

By the waters of Babylon.

It was no light or easy journey he had thus rashly undertaken on the faith of a dream,—­for dream he still believed it to be.  Many weary days and nights were consumed in the comfortless tedium of travel, . . and though he constantly told himself what unheard-of folly it was to pursue an illusive chimera of his own imagination,—­a mere phantasm which had somehow or other taken possession of his brain at a time when that brain must have been acted upon (so he continued to think) by strong mesmeric or magnetic influence, he went on his way all the same with a sort of dogged obstinacy which no fatigue could daunt or lessen.  He never lay down to rest without the faint hope of seeing once again, if only in sleep, the radiant Being whose haunting words had sent him on this quest of “Ardath,”—­but herein his expectations were not realized.  No more flower-crowned angels floated before him—­no sweet whisper of love, encouragement, or promise came mysteriously on his ears in the midnight silences,—­his slumbers were always profound and placid as those of a child and utterly dreamless.