Further expostulation was vain. Yusuf retired to his own apartment, and prayed long and fervently, in his own simple way, offering thanks for the light which was breaking so radiantly on his own soul, and beseeching the loving Jesus to touch the heart of Amzi, who, he knew, though less enthusiastic than he, also desired to know truth. And before he lay down for a short rest, he said: "Grant, O Jesus, thou who art ever present, that I may know thee better, and that Amzi, too, may learn to know thee. Reveal thyself to him as thou art revealing thyself to me, that we may know thee as we should." The priest's face grew radiant with happiness as he concluded. And yet, in that same city, vice held sway; for, even as the priest prayed, a dark figure emerged from an unused upper attic in the house of Nathan the Jew, and, escaping by a window, descended a garden stair and disappeared in the darkness. Even in that dim light, had one looked he might have noted that the mysterious prowler wore the dress of a dervish. CHAPTER VI. YUSUF'S FIRST MEETING WITH MOHAMMED. "A person with abnormal auditory sensations often comes to interpret them as voices of demons, or as the voice of one commanding him to do some deed. This hallucination, in turn, becomes an apperceiving organ, _i.e._, other perceptions and ideas are assimilated to it: it becomes a center about which many ideas gather and are correspondingly distorted."--_McLellan, Psychology._ Upon the evening of the following day, Amzi and Yusuf set out in quest of Mohammed, to whom the manuscript had not yet been given. Stopping at the house of Cadijah, a stone building having some pretensions to grandeur, they learned that Mohammed had left the city. Accordingly, thinking he would probably be found in the Cave of Hira, they took a by-path towards the mountains. The sun was hot, but a pleasant breeze blew from the plains towards the Nejd, and, from the elevation which they now ascended, Yusuf noted with interest a scene every point of which was entirely different from that of his Persian home--different perhaps from that of any other spot on the face of the earth; a scene desolate, wild, and barren, yet destined to be the cradle of a mighty movement that was ere long to agitate the entire peninsula of Arabia, and eventually to exercise its baneful influence over a great part of the Eastern Hemisphere.[7]