The slave trembled, in spite of his conviction that the saint was crazed. He dreaded the influence of his wild sallies of prophecy. Day after day passed, and neither food nor water was seen to pass the diviner’s lips. The guards were astonished, and beheld him with sacred awe. They vowed they never slept: they were constantly changed, but precisely the same result followed--the inspired man was seen to taste nothing. He sat upon the cold ground, without a rag to cover him, in an apparent state of devout abstraction, never uttering a word; except now and then, when he poured out terrible denunciations of wrath against those who had blinded the late king and murdered his nobles. Fifteen days of the term of fasting had already expired, and no change appeared in the prophet. His eyes occasionally sparkled with fierce brightness, though he said nothing, and the watchers began to grow uneasy in his company. They feared a proximity to something unearthly; and in proportion as they were impressed with this superstitious feeling, in their eyes their sacred charge grew more deformed and hideous. They placed themselves at the very extremity of the tent, and were so awed by his ghoul-like appearance, that they were obliged, for relief, to turn their faces to the broad sky, and remit their vigils until they had recovered their self-possession. They took it for granted, however, that he could not, like some less disgusting reptiles, feed upon the dust, and therefore hesitated not to report, at the end of their term of watching, that the saint had taken nothing but a chameleon diet, and yet was as lively as that celebrated lizard after a six months’ fattening upon good wholesome air. The people’s astonishment was daily increased by the report of those persons appointed to watch the devotee. They already began to talk of dedicating a temple to him, and paying him divine honours. On the twentieth morning of his voluntary abstinence, the venerable probationer desired that some of the authorities might be summoned to attest his having undergone half of his prescribed mortification, and to witness his performance of a holy rite. Lallcheen accordingly visited the seer. “Behold!” said the man, “I have subsisted twenty days without earthly food, sustained by a heavenly nutriment, which the eye does not see, but the body is sensible of. This night the Prophet has visited me, and here is the sign of his coming;” saying this he held between his bony fingers a white pebble about the size of a plum. “Within this,” he continued, “is the revelation which I shall make known to you at the termination of my penance.” Having once more exhibited the pebble, he jerked it from his fingers into his mouth, and swallowed it in an instant. “For twenty days I need no further nourishment. A stone is neither meat nor drink, yet will it invigorate this withered body to tell you things to come. Leave me.”