"Speak!" he whispered. "Thou, _Abou-el-Hol_, Father of Terror, thou who broodedst over the silences ere Moses ben Amram led my people from this land of bondage, shall I not lead them from their dispersal to their ancient unity in the day when God shall be One, and His Name One?" The Sphinx was silent. The white sea of sand stretched away endlessly with noiseless billows. The Pyramids threw funereal shadows over the arid waste. "Yea," he cried, passionately. "My Father hath not deceived me. Through me, through me flow the streams of grace to recreate and rekindle. Hath He not revealed it to me, even ere this day of Salvation for Jerusalem, by the date of my birth, by the ancient parchment, by the homage of Nathan, by the faith of my brethren and the rumor of the nations, by my sufferings, by my self-appointed martyrdoms, by my long, weary years of forced wanderings to and fro upon the earth, by my loneliness--ah, God--my loneliness!" The Sphinx brooded solemnly under the brooding stars. Sabbataï's voice was as the wail of a wind. "Yea, I will save Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the desert, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her vineyards from thence, and the Valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she shall sing there as in the days of her youth and as in the days when she came up out of the land of Egypt. And I will say to them which were not my people, 'Thou art my people'; and they shall say, 'Thou art my God.'" The Sphinx was silent. And in that silence there was the voice of dead generations that had bustled and dreamed and passed away, countless as the grains of desert sand. Sabbataï ceased and surveyed the Face in answering silence, his own face growing as inscrutable. "We are strong and lonely--thou and I," he whispered at last. But the Sphinx was silent. (_Here endeth the First Scroll._) SCROLL THE SECOND XI In a little Polish town, early one summer morning, two Jewish women, passing by the cemetery, saw a spirit fluttering whitely among the tombs. They shrieked, whereupon the figure turned, revealing a beautiful girl in her night-dress, her face, albeit distraught, touched unmistakably with the hues of life. "Ah, ye be daughters of Israel!" cried the strange apparition. "Help me! I have escaped from the nunnery." "Who art thou?" said they, moving towards her. "The Messiah's Bride!" And her face shone. They stood rooted to the soil. A fresh thrill of the supernatural ran through them. "Nay, come hither," she cried. "See." And she showed them nail-marks on her naked flesh. "Last night my father's ghostly hands dragged me from the convent."