Darkness.  Something had happened; they had carried him into a place full of endless penances, floggings, starvings.  Then they accused him of doing wrong.  What was it?  The flesh of warm-blooded beasts. . . .  He had preferred the service of God to that of his earthly master.  For this they banished him and made him suffer.  He was dying now—­dying to save mankind.  He was giving up his life for sinners.  Someone else had once done the same thing.  Who was it?  He could not remember.  People who read and write—­they know these things.  Some saint, possibly; or at least a man from another province—­someone he had never met or spoken to.  A good Russian, whoever it was.  But the name—­the name had slipped out of his mind.  He always had a good memory for faces, but a bad one for names.

He was so ill and oppressed too.  Worse than before.  He felt himself rotting earthwards, like a fungus of his own native forests under autumn rains.  His body remained inert but his eye, roaming away from the straw pallet, fixed itself upon the door.  When, when would that kindly gentleman with the instrument arrive?

CHAPTER XXXVII

Concerning the life and death of Saint Eulalia, patroness of Nepenthean sailors, we possess ample and accurate information.

She was born in 1712 at a remote village in the Spanish province of Estramadura.  Various divine portents accompanied her birth.  Her mother dreamed a strange dream about a sea-serpent; her father was cured of a painful gouty affection; the image of Saint James of Compostella in the local church was observed to smile benignly at the very hour of her entry into the world.  At the age of two years and eleven months she took the vow of chastity.  Much difficulty was experienced in keeping the infant alive; she tormented her body in so merciless a fashion.  She refused to partake of food save once in every five weeks; she remained immovable “like a statue” for months on end; she wore under her rough clothing iron spikes which were found, after death, to have entered deeply into her flesh.  She was never known to use a drop of water for purposes of ablution or to change her underwear more than once a year, and then only at the order of her confessor who was obliged to be in daily contact with her.  The heat of her body was such that it could not be touched by human hands.  During her frequent trances she spoke accurately in sixty-nine different languages; there was no hair whatever on her head which was “spotless as an egg.”  She put baskets of sea urchins into her bed and, as a penance for what she called “her many sins,” forced herself to catch the legions of vermin that infested her brown blanket, count them, separate the males from the females, set them free once more, and begin over again.  She died at the age of fourteen years and two months.  Her corpse forthwith became roseate in colour, exhaled a delicious odour of violets for twenty weeks, and performed countless miracles.  On dissection, a portrait of Saint James of Compostella was discovered embedded in her liver.