At last he slept, exhausted, and past his piteous, prostrate childhood and helplessness the slow procession wound its way up the mountain road toward the crescent of Bethlehem, knowing nothing of his nearness to its unburdened comfort and simple peace.

When he awakened, the night had fallen, and he opened his eyes upon a high vault of blue velvet darkness strewn with great stars.  He saw this at the first moment of his consciousness; then he realized that there was no longer to be heard the sound either of passing hoofs or treading feet.  The travelers who had gone by during the day had probably reached their journey’s end, and gone to rest in their tents, or had found refuge in the inclosing khan that gave shelter to wayfarers and their beasts of burden.

But though there was no human creature near, and no sound of human voice or human tread, a strange change had taken place in him.  His loneliness had passed away, and left him lying still and calm as though it had never existed, as though the crushed and broken child who had plunged from a precipice of woe into deadly, exhausted sleep was only a vague memory of a creature in a dark past dream.

Had it been himself?  Lying upon his back, seeing only the immensity of the deep blue above him and the greatness of the stars, he scarcely dared to draw breath lest he should arouse himself to new anguish.  It had not been he who had so suffered; surely it had been another Zia.  What had come upon him, what had come upon the world?  All was so still that it was as if the earth waited—­as if it waited to hear some word that would be spoken out of the great space in which it hung.  He was not hungry or cold or tired.  It was as if he had never staggered and stumbled up the mountain path and dropped shuddering, to hide behind the bushes before the daylight came and men could see his white face.  Surely he had rested long.  He had never felt like this before, and he had never seen so wonderful a night.  The stars had never been so many and so large.  What made them so soft and brilliant that each one was almost like a sun?  And he strangely felt that each looked down at him as if it said the word, though he did not know what the word was.  Why had he been so terror-stricken?  Why had he been so wretched?  There were no lepers; there were no hunchbacks.  There was only Zia, and he was at peace, and akin to the stars that looked down.

How heavenly still the waiting world was, how heavenly still!  He lay and smiled and smiled; perhaps he lay so for an hour.  Then high, high above he saw, or thought he saw, in the remoteness of the vault of blue a brilliant whiteness float.  Was it a strange snowy cloud or was he dreaming?  It seemed to grow whiter, more brilliant.  His breath came fast, and his heart beat trembling in his breast, because he had never seen clouds so strangely, purely brilliant.  There was another, higher, farther distant, and yet more dazzling still.  Another and another showed its radiance until at last an arch of splendor seemed to stream across the sky.