His companion, meanwhile, beheld the panorama in all its nightmarish splendour, as it drifted past him. He saw the bluffs of feathery pumice, the lava precipices--frozen cataracts of white, black, blood red, pale grey and sombre brown, smeared over with a vitreous enamel of obsidian or pierced by oily, writhing dykes that blazed with metallic scintillations. Anon came some yawning cleft or an assemblage of dizzy rock-needles, fused into whimsical tints and attitudes, spiky, distorted, over-toppling; then a bold tufa rampart, immaculate in its beauty, stainless as a curtain of silk. And as the boat moved on he looked into horrid dells which the rains had torn out of the loose scoriae. Gaping wounds, they wore the bright hues of corruption. Their flanks were blotched with a livid nitrous efflorescence, with flaring sulphur, unhealthy verdure of pitchstone, streaks of arsenical vermilion; their beds--a frantic maze of boulders. He beheld this crazy stratification, this chaos of incandescent nature, sent in a flame of deep blue sky and sea. It lay there calmly, like some phantasmagoric flower, some monstrous rose that swoons away, with upturned face, in a solar caress. He saw it with the eye. His mind was elsewhere. He was trying, in honest and relentless fashion, to discover himself. What if his human values were really wrong? Thomas, the doubting apostle.... Africa had made him think; had made him more silent and reflective than ever. And now this sudden strange stimulus of Nepenthe--it was driving his thoughts headlong, out of their old grooves. Here was Keith, a man of altogether different stamp, drawing conclusions which he dared not formulate for himself. How far were they applicable, those old Hebrew precepts, to modern conditions? Were they still availing as guides to conduct? "You are a candid person, Keith, and I think I am. I sincerely try to be. Will you tell me what you think? You seem to have a quarrel with Moses and his commandments, which we are taught to regard as the keystone of ethics. I don't want to discuss things. I want to listen to the opinions of a man so different from myself as you are. It may do me good. And I think I could stand almost anything," he added, with a laugh, "in this landscape--in this clear pagan light, as you call it." "I used to be interested in such things as a boy. I suppose all respectable boys are; and I was respectable even at that tender age. Nowadays, though I still pick up an Oriental rug now and then, I have no further use for Oriental gods." "What is your objection to them?" Mr. Keith paused before replying. Then he said: