He remembered painfully those that had rejected his ideas of religion and immortality and God, that had driven him, at the age of twenty-four, from the calling forced upon him by his people. As a boy he had yearned to make himself an artist; his family had made him a clergyman; fate had made him a failure. No, a failure only so far in his life, he reminded himself -- in the lonely days and silent nights of the desert he had experienced a strange birth of hope. True, it was adventure that had called him, but it was filled with a vague and spiritual hope. It contained a dream of promise, a nameless strength that gave support to his earlier ideas.

As he rode around a corner of the stone house his horse snorted and stopped.