5. The High Desert -

Where silence and the legend dwell,
A cleft in Horeb is, they tell,
Through which upon one happy day
(The sun on his heraldic track
Due sign having gained in Zodiac)
A sunbeam darts, which slants away
Through ancient carven oriel
Or window in the Convent there,
Illuming so with annual flush
The sombre vaulted chamber spare
Of Catherine's Chapel of the Bush —
The Burning Bush. Brief visitant,
It makes no lasting covenant;
It brings, but cannot leave, the ray.
To hearts which here the desert smote,
So came, so went the Cypriote.
Derwent deep felt it; and, as fain
His prior spirits to regain;
Impatient too of scenes which led
To converse such as late was bred,
Moved to go on. But some declined.
So, for relief to heart which pined,
Belex he sought, by him sat down
In cordial ease upon a stone
Apart, and heard his stories free
Of Ibrahim's wild infantry.
The rest abide. To these there comes,
As down on Siddim's scene they peer,
The contrast of their vernal homes —
Field, orchard, and the harvest cheer.
At variance in their revery move
The spleen of nature and her love:
At variance, yet entangled too —
Like wrestlers. Here in apt review
They call to mind Abel and Cain
Ormuzd involved with Ahriman
In deadly lock. Were those gods gone?
Or under other names lived on?
The theme they started. 'Twas averred
That, in old Gnostic pages blurred,
Jehovah was construed to be
Author of evil, yea, its god;
And Christ divine His contrary:
A god was held against a god,
But Christ revered alone. Herefrom,
If inference availeth aught
(For still the topic pressed they home),
The twofold Testaments become
Transmitters of Chaldaic thought
By implication. If no more
Those Gnostic heretics prevail
Which shook the East from shore to shore,
Their strife forgotten now and pale;
Yet, with the sects, that old revolt
Now reappears, if in assault
Less frank: none say Jehovah 's evil,
None gainsay that He bears the rod;
Scarce that, but there 's dismission civil,
And Jesus is the indulgent God.
This change, this dusking change that slips
(Like the penumbra o'er the sun),
Over the faith transmitted down;
Foreshadows it complete eclipse?
Science and Faith, can these unite?
Or is that priestly instinct right
(Right as regards conserving still
The Church's reign) whose strenuous will
Made Galileo pale recite
The Penitential Psalms in vest
Of sackcloth; which to day would blight
Those potent solvents late expressed
In laboratories of the West?
But in her Protestant repose
Snores faith toward her mortal close?
Nay, like a sachem petrified,
Encaved found in the mountain-side,
Perfect in feature, true in limb,
Life's full similitude in him,
Yet all mere stone — is faith dead now ,
A petrifaction? Grant it so,
Then what 's in store? what shapeless birth?
Reveal the doom reserved for earth?
How far may seas retiring go?
But, to redeem us, shall we say
That faith, undying, does but range,
Casting the skin — the creed. In change
Dead always does some creed delay —
Dead, not interred, though hard upon
Interment's brink? At Saint Denis,
Where slept the Capets, sire and son,
Eight centuries of lineal clay,
On steps that led down into vault
The prince inurned last made a halt,
The coffin left they there, 'tis said,
Till the inheritor was dead;
Then, not till then 'twas laid away.
But if no more the creeds be linked,
If the long line 's at last extinct,
If time both creed and faith betray,
Vesture and vested — yet again
What interregnum or what reign
Ensues? Or does a period come?
The Sibyls' books lodged in the tomb?
Shall endless time no more unfold
Of truth at core? Some things discerned
By the far Noahs of India old —
Earth's first spectators, the clear-eyed,
Unvitiated, unfalsified
Seers at first hand — shall these be learned,
Though late, even by the New World, say,
Which now contemns?
But what shall stay
The fever of advance? London immense
Still wax for aye? A check: but whence?
How of the teeming Prairie-Land?
There shall the plenitude expand
Unthinned, unawed? Or does it need
Only that men should breed and breed
To enrich those forces into play
Which in past times could oversway
Pride at his proudest? Do they come,
The locusts, only to the bloom?
Prosperity sire them?
Thus they swept,
Nor sequence held, consistent tone —
Imagination wildering on
Through vacant halls which faith once kept
With ushers good
Themselves thus lost,
At settled hearts they wonder most.
For those (they asked) who still adhere
In homely habit's dull delay,
To dreams dreamed out or passed away;
Do these, our pagans, all appear
Much like each poor and busy one
Who when the Tartar took Pekin
(If credence hearsay old may win),
Knew not the fact — so vast the town,
The multitude, the maze, the din?
Still laggeth in deferred adieu
The A.D. (Anno Domini)
Overlapping into era new
Even as the Roman A.U.C.
Yet ran for time, regardless all
That Christ was born, and after fall
Of Rome itself?
But now our age,
So infidel in equipage,
While carrying still the Christian name
For all its self-asserted claim,
How fares it, tell? Can the age stem
Its own conclusions? is 't a king
Awed by his conquests which enring
With menaces his diadem?
Bright visions of the times to be —
Must these recoil, ere long be cowed
Before the march in league avowed
Of Mammon and Democracy?
In one result whereto we tend
Shall Science disappoint the hope,
Yea, to confound us in the end,
New doors to superstition ope?
As years, as years and annals grow,
And action and reaction vie,
And never men attain, but know
How waves on waves forever die;
Does all more enigmatic show?
So they; and in the vain appeal
Persisted yet, as ever still
Blown back in sleet that blinds the eyes,
Not less the fervid Geysers rise.

Clarel meantime ungladdened bent
Regardful, and the more intent
For silence held. At whiles his eye
Lit on the Druze, reclined half prone,
The long pipe resting on the stone
And wreaths of vapour floating by —
The man and pipe in peace as one.
How clear the profile, clear and true;
And he so tawny. Bust ye view,
Antique, in alabaster brown,
Might show like that. There, all aside,
How passionless he took for bride
The calm — the calm, but not the dearth —
The dearth or waste; nor would he fall
In waste of words, that waste of all.

For Vine, from that unchristened earth
Bits he picked up of porous stone,
And crushed in fist: or one by one,
Through the dull void of desert air,
He tossed them into valley down;
Or pelted his own shadow there;
Nor sided he with anything:
By fits, indeed, he wakeful looked;
But, in the main, how ill he brooked
That weary length of arguing —
Like tale interminable told
In Hades by some gossip old
To while the never-ending night.
Apart he went. Meantime, like kite
On Sidon perched, which doth enfold,
Slowly exact, the noiseless wing:
Each wrinkled Arab Bethlehemite,
Or trooper of the Arab ring,
With look of Endor's withered sprite
Slant peered on them from lateral height;
While unperturbed over deserts riven,
Stretched the clear vault of hollow heaven.