tria, Notaricon, and Themurah. By the first he converted the letters of a word (or passage) into numbers, then employed the arithmetic value of the whole to explain the sense of the passage. By the second, each letter of a word was regarded as the initial of some other word, and thus a cabalistic sentence was secured, which gave him an explanation of the word with which he started. By the last of the methods, the Themurah, he transposed the letters of a word or sentence, and so obtained enlightenment.

He also elaborated certain enormous systems of belief, which he called the Yetzirah and the Zohar. By these he attempted to explain the natures of the finite and the infinite; time and eternity; matter and space (in a word, the world) and God. He supposed that, out from God, had come ten emanations, or Sephiroth, and so he attempted to bridge the impassable gulf which lay between him and his Maker, but the more he tried to build that bridge, the farther the Maker stood away from him. The old, old longing he had felt while still a shepherd boy with crook and psalter in the fields of far Pentapolis was again resurgent in his breast. To touch the very Lord himself, to feel of His garment, to behold Him, to know Him as he might have known a father or a brother! "Jehovah! Jehovah! That I might come anigh unto thee!"

Perhaps the long confinement, the incredible suffering, had forced some shadowy reflection of the Infinite into the chambers of his halfruined brain. If so, he was never able to express that great reflection clearly. He thought that he sifted and separated, clarified and deepened, but, in truth, he only commingled and confused, darkened and superficialized. The long confinement and the hard servitude! He had strangely deteriorated.

He also began to notice (being here in the darkness alone, and, for the most part, wholly unguarded) an increasing tendency to hold long conversations with himself. He was often surprised to discover that, throughout the course of such a one-man talk, his lips were absolutely motionless-in fact were tightly sealed, so that he could not have opened them articulately, even if he would. He had too (at rare intervals) a feeling of inexpressible humility. He sometimes seemed to himself to be lower, far lower, than the stinkingest excrement. Did not even the buckets of ordure go up for a time into God's sunlight? Then, one day, he heard a voice adjure him: "Courage! for I am always with thee!" At another time, the voice came nearer, and said: "Is this microcosm or macrocosm?" And behold! the

1 See, for example, Waite, "The Doctrine and Literature of The Kabalah."

solid wall of mingled rock and darkness cracked, as it were, and revealed to his night-intoxicated eyes a cosmophanic phantasmagoria of unimaginable brilliancy and effect. "The world! The world! Sunlight!"

When he had staggered to his feet again, the world had vanished, and he kept on chiselling.

Not long after, the world appeared once more. This time it stayed a while, and he saw it as never his eyes had seen or man or beast, or field or sky, in the world of actuality. In the bosom of the solid rock he beheld a symbolical procession of all the human forces and weaknesses which tread the stage of earth, and all in relation to his own mission: Kings and queens, which walked ever forwards backwards, being pressed on by the multitude; hunchback zanies in foolishest apparel but speaking straightest wisdom; long-bearded, gigantic philosophers stumbling, ever stumbling, because of the nets which they themselves had woven about their own feet; harlots (some in red and some in white); priests that laughed inwardly and priests whose faces were like happy prayers; lovers and murderers, sailors and farmers, scholars and children and courtiers and idlers and mere fools. And all in a kind of pompous-tearful allegory- But what an illuminating and time-explaining phantasmagoria, there against the widening end-face of an endless mine!

There was much to be read in the medley-as often there is in the sheer babblings of a man that is wholly mad. And SamsonSolomon, which is also Simon, of Cyrene, looked and did read.

And of a sudden he beheld at a little way behind the great welter of the strange procession-laughing and lagging and making gestures of mere levity and levitous contempt-Trivialis. Simon cried (but only, as it seemed, in his breast) "O steward of my father and mongrel of all nations, do I indeed love thee, or do I hate thee and despise?"

And at once he saw, at a little way behind Trivialis (forming as it were a peculiar group apart, for that they were not wholly of the multitude, neither of Trivialis), Lampadephorus and also that sunnyheaded Greek which had formerly worked beside Simon in the mine, and then-a halting, shamefaced, priestly Jew, even the Rejected, Simon of Cyrene.

And Simon and the sunny-headed worker of the mine held sweet converse for a time, then quarrelled and afterwards went their ways alone. While all the time beside them went the spirit of Lampadephorus. But now, at length, the Jew beheld that what he had at first taken for Lampadephorus was solely a ghost.

And once again Simon looked and beheld there was yet another group that was rearward still. And he cried out also, yet once again (but, behold, as on that other time, in his bosom alone): "Berith, Leah, Machashebethel!" (Covenant, Labor, The Purpose of God). And he also cried, "Simkah! Gheel!"

And he saw that Berith held out her hands unto the Simon which marched before her in the procession, and cried unto him, and would have come up anigh unto him, but that she could not.

Then beheld Simon that, by her side, marched yet one other (and a sweetly-solemn) ghost, and one that did from time to time, give tender support and sweet succor unto her. The ghost was that of the Man whose cross he had borne up Calvary.

On another occasion, Simon beheld himself more vividly, and, over his back, a great bag, labelled "Gold!" It was for the reason of the bag that he that was in the procession saw not Berith, which is Machashebethel. At other times he beheld, in solemn allegorical procession, the virtues and the vices, the arts and sciences, countries, climates, seasons, things past and things present and to come, things for the eyes of human beings and things for the eyes of gods-all filing before him in a strangely contradictory and unintelligible, if illuminate, dumb show. A burst of heavenly music would sometimes come into the scene.

The pageants, from day to day, grew vivider and still more vivid, the music sweeter and more sweet. Then began the heart of Simon to fill with fear.

"O God," cried he, in his soul, "O God, O God! O God, let not this thing come upon me, but let me die! O God, O God!" And at that a golden burst of trumpets sounded and a blaze of noonday glory shot from pillared wall to pillared wall.

In the midst-Ophidion! And angels came and waited on Ophidion's will!

Then took Simon of Cyrene his chain and rent it, and would have run at the bright aerial creations, and cast himself upon them, even in the rock. But behold! there was a crash as if the day of days had thundered. The images all vanished. The floor moved and twisted, and Simon of Cyrene saw at a great way off, in a long apartment of the writhing mine, the forms of many calm slaves, a-working: they wavered a little and were gone. He clapped his hard hands over his eyes to keep the outer brightness from them, and then said softly (at least in his bosom, for he could not outwardly speak): "Thou hast cleft the mountains and the hills, and hast delivered me. O my God, my God!"

CHAPTER XXXII

CHRISTOPHERUS

It was but a little space till Simon of Cyrene could gaze again. Then found he him a-standing on a fragment of that gallery floor whereon he had toiled and beheld strange visions. He attempted to shout, "Nay-ree-yaw-hoo!" which is to say, "O Light of Jehovah!" but could not. The end-face of the wall had dropped, as it never had existed, and, in its stead, a dazzling emptiness of silent air. For his ears were stopped with the thunders which had come at the riving of the mountain, yea with the dropping of his walls were the gates of sound stopped up. Came shrill cries from an eagle far below: Simon heard as one in a sealed-up cell. He looked down over the stone whereon he stood, to behold the eagle! And drew back quickly, and clung to the solid rock through fear.

Then gazed he into the sky, the house of Jehovah. Turning clouds of bossiness, floating on crystalline void! Now the largest of the masses was shaped, as Simon believed, to resemble a mighty, if aweary, man. And the man swam on a mist of great cloud-ocean, bordered by a jagged shore of cloud-land rocks. The giant, turning his hoary head as he swam, sought for a haven amid the shore of stone. For a time he did well truly, even became jubilant and uplift. Then, out of somewhere-but who could say just whence-an influence arose which moved him (mocking) in the opposite way; the cloudman's head sank upon the waters, it passed down within them, it was gone.

Simon adventured to turn his eyes once more over the shelf. Then saw he the thing which had been. Far down in the valley below, he beheld that portion of the mountain in which the mine had been hollowed out. Gone! All gone! Greed had done its uttermost. The galleries, the rooms, the shafts, the slaves, the supervisors, the higher officers and all-all gone. Only a bit of accidental shelf remained, fastened to the standing portion of the mountain. Even the end-face of the wall was gone down into nothingness. Solely the shelf on which he stood, the straight wall running high above it, and, over that, another and farther jutting shelf.

And when he had begun to comprehend the whole of the great thing which had happened, he attempted to lift a clear voice in words of sweet praise unto God, for at least the salvation of himself. But behold! there were no words that came into his mouth nor syllables upon his tongue. For the long years, the long, long voiceless

years, had left him inarticulate. Yet he said within himself, "All that hath happened unto me hath happened by thy will, O Lord: I have had no choice, but thou alone hast chosen for me. And what, O Lord, am I?"

Now it began to come into his mind that some of the soldiers of Cæsar might, by a chance, have been upon the solider portion of the mountain when the landslide came, and thus have escaped injury. If so, they might soon come and apprehend him. Moreover, although the mine in which he had been confined was the worst of all, yet it was not by any means the one and only. But every hill within his view was either pierced by some dark mine of wretchedness, or else (as he clearly foresaw) it would be so pierced upon some future day. How should he get wholly away from hence?

He looked down over the shelf once more. The eagle was yet a-weighing of its wings, though it had come a little higher up unto him. Far, far below the eagle, was a vast reach of verdant valley, through which a peaceful river ran. Ah, that placid river! With what an emotion had he gazed upon it (God knew how many years gone by!) before he had entered the shaft which had led down into these mines! Over the stream was, here and there, an arch of stone. Cæsar! Was he indeed out of prison? Had he truly escaped? Were there not prisons without walls? incarcerations without confinement? Beyond the stream were forests indeed, showing but tiny parellelograms of clearing. But, of a sudden, his eye was caught by a swiftly moving object, not transfluvial. There in the rolling plain which led from the river toward the new-fallen mount, it seemed to catch and cast the light around violently. Then he began to perceive that the object was longer than at first he had thought, and that it wound snakelike along a yellow trench of road which was deeply cut into the verdure of the near champaign.

A body of soldiers in steel and brass!

By straining his pore-blind and light-unaccustomed eyes he could just discern at intervals, both the soldiers' helmets and the heads of horses. The slide-it had been discovered!

He suffered himself just one more look at the awful flank of the mountain which had been removed by the careless and greedy hands of men, guided by the absolutely unerring, if unseeing, finger of God. Then he said, deep down in the chambers of his heart: "Thou hast left a little also, O Lord, for these, mine own, hands, to accomplish." So he put his muscles and his bones to the work.

The solid wall behind him, as it arose, reached out over his tiny