All this stands on a hill of gentle slope, green as grass; and it is backed close against a steep mountain-side, of which the tree-trunks are conjectural, for I never saw any, the trees resembling rather one continuous leafy tree-top, run out high and far over the extent of the mountain.

* * * * *

I was there four months, till something drove me away.  I do not know what had become of the fathers and brothers, for I only found five, four of whom I took in two journeys in the motor beyond the church of Saint Martial d’Artenset, and left them there; and the fifth remained three weeks with me, for I would not disturb him in his prayer.  He was a bearded brother of forty years or thereabouts, who knelt in his cell robed and hooded in all his phantom white:  for in no way different from whatever is most phantom, visionary and eerie must a procession of these people have seemed by gloaming, or dark night This particular brother knelt, I say, in his small chaste room, glaring upward at his Christ, who hung long-armed in a little recess between the side of three narrow bookshelves and a projection of the wall; and under the Christ a gilt and blue Madonna; the books on the three shelves few, leaning different ways.  His right elbow rested on a square plain table, at which was a wooden chair; behind him, in a corner, the bed:  a bed all enclosed in dark boards, a broad perpendicular board along the foot, reaching the ceiling, a horizontal board at the side over which he got into bed, another narrower one like it at the ceiling for fringe and curtain, and another perpendicular one hiding the pillow, making the clean bed within a very shady and cosy little den, on the wall of this den being another smaller Christ and a little picture.  On the perpendicular board at the foot hung two white garments, and over a second chair at the bed-side another:  all very neat and holy.  He was a large stern man, blond as corn, but with some red, too, in his hairy beard; and appalling was the significance of those eyes that prayed, and the long-drawn cavity of those saffron cheeks.  I cannot explain to myself my deep reverence for this man; but I had it, certainly.  Many of the others, it is clear, had fled:  but not he:  and to the near-marching cloud he opposed the Cross, holding one real as the other—­he alone among many.  For Christianity was an elite religion, in which all were called, but few chosen, differing from Mohammedanism and Buddhism, which grasped and conquered all within their reach:  the effect of Christ rather resembling Plato’s and Dante’s, it would seem:  but Mahomet’s more like Homer’s and Shakespeare’s.