No better commodity have we for the moment, the curator said, struck by the precarious shelter the hut offered--a crazy door and a roof that let the starlight through at one end of the wall. But the rains are over, he added, and the coverlet is a warm one. On this he left Joseph, whom the bell would call to orison, too tired to sleep, turning vaguely from side to side, trying to hush the thoughts that hurtled through his clear brain--that stars endure for ever, but the life of the palm-tree was as the life of the man who fed on its fruit. The tree lived one hundred years, and among the Essenes a centenarian was no rare thing, but of what value to live a hundred years in the monotonous life of the cenoby? And in his imagination, heightened by insomnia, the Essenes seemed to him like the sleeping trees. If he remained he would become like them, while his father lived alone in Galilee! Dan rose up before him and he could find no sense in the assurances he had given the president that he wished to be admitted into the order. He seemed no longer to desire admission, and if he did desire it he could not, for his father's sake, accept the admission. Then why had he talked as he had done to the president? He could not tell: and it must have been while lying on his right side, trying to understand himself, what he was and why he was in the cenoby, that he fell into that deep and dreamless sleep from which he was awakened by a bell, and so suddenly that it seemed to him that he had not been asleep more than a few minutes. It was no doubt the bell for morning prayer: and only half awake he repaired with the other proselytes to the part of the village open to the sunrise. All the Essenes were assembled there, and he learnt that they looked upon this prayer of thanksgiving for the return of light as the important event of the day. He joined in it, though he suspected a certain idolatry in the prayer. It seemed to him that the Essenes were praying for the sun to rise; but to do this would be to worship the sun in some measure, and to look upon the sun as in some degree a God, he feared; but the Essenes were certainly very pious Jews. What else they were, time would reveal to him: a few days would be enough; and long before the prayer was finished he was thinking of his father in Galilee and what his face would tell, were he to see his son bowing before the sun. But the Essenes were not really worshipping the sun but praying to God that the sun might rise and give them light again to continue their daily work. One whole day at least he must spend in the cenoby, and--feeling that he was becoming interested again in the Essenes--he began to form a plan to stay some time with them.