It seemed to the blind man like one vast banquet in the dark, interrupted only by sleep.

The hope of counsel from the gods cheered the depressed mood which had weighed upon him for several weeks, and rich young Silanus praised the lucky fate which had enabled him to find a travelling companion whose intellect and wit charmed him and the others, and often detained them over the wine until late into the night.

Here, too, Hermon felt himself the most distinguished person, the animating and attracting power, until it was said that the voyage was over, and the company pitched their tents in the famous oasis near the Temple of Amon.

The musicians and dancers, with due regard to propriety, had been left behind in the seaport of Paraetonium.  Yet the young travellers were sufficiently gay while Silanus and Hermon waited for admission to the place of the oracle.  A week after their arrival it was opened to them, yet the words repeated to them by the priest satisfied neither Hermon nor Archon’s son, for the oracle advised the latter to bring his mother herself to the oasis by the land road if she earnestly desired recovery, while to Hermon was shouted the ambiguous saying: 

  “Only night and darkness spring from the rank marsh of pleasure;
   Morning and day rise brightly from the starving sand.”

Could Silanus’s mother, who was unable to move, endure the desert journey?  And what was the meaning of the sand, from which morning and day—­which was probably the fresh enjoyment of the light—­were to rise for Hermon?  The sentence of the oracle weighed heavily upon him, as well as on Archon’s son, who loved his mother, and the homeward journey became to the blind man by no means a cheerful but rather a very troubled dream.

Thoughtful, very disturbed, dissatisfied with himself, and resolved to turn his back upon the dreary life of pleasure which for so long a time had allowed him no rest, and now disgusted him, he kept aloof from his travelling companions, and rejoiced when, at Alexandria, he was led ashore in the harbour of Eunostus.

CHAPTER VII.

Hermon entered his house with drooping head.

Here he was informed that the grammateus of the Dionysian artists had already called twice to speak to him concerning an important matter.  When he came from the bath, Proclus visited him again.  His errand was to invite him to a banquet which was to take place that evening at his residence in a wing of the royal palace.

But Hermon was not in the mood to share a joyous revel, and he frankly said so, although immediately after his return he had accepted the invitation to the festival which the whole fellowship of artists would give the following day in honour of the seventieth birthday of the old sculptor Euphranor.  The grammateus alluded to this, and most positively insisted that he could not release him; for he came not only by his