"Surely," they thought, "Anti-Christ, the man apostate from God, must have intentionally led them into this accursed place, to leave them to their doom." Some murmured, "Curse the generals!" but incoherently, as in a dream. Others kept praying and whining like sick children, begging a crust of bread or a mouthful of wine from their companions. Many from weakness dropped and died on the road. The Emperor ordered the last rations kept for himself and for his staff to be distributed among the famished rank and file. He contented himself with a thin soup of flour and suet, a fare from which the meanest soldier would have revolted. Thanks to extreme temperance, he felt continually full of nervous excitement, and at the same time a lightness of body, as if he had wings. This lightness sustained him and increased his strength tenfold. He attempted not to think of the future. But to return to Antioch or Tarsus, defeated, and to submit to Galilean ridicule, that he certainly would never endure. One night the soldiers were resting, the north wind having driven off the flies. Oil, flour, and wine, from the last Imperial supply, had assuaged their hunger. The hope of return gradually revived. The camp became silent. Julian withdrew to his tent. Now he was wont almost to dispense with sleep, or if he slept at all, it was towards daybreak. If by chance profound slumber overtook him, he would wake terrified, with drops of cold sweat on his forehead. He had need of full possession of consciousness to stifle the dull pain gnawing at his soul. Entering his tent, he trimmed the lamp with a pair of snuffers. Rolls of parchment and the Gospels lay around him on the ground in disorder. He began to write his favourite work, _Against the Christians_, begun two months previously at the opening of the campaign. Reclining, with his back turned to the tent door, Julian was re-reading the manuscript, when suddenly he heard a slight noise. He turned round, uttered a cry, and sprang to his feet. He thought he saw a ghost. On the threshold stood a youth, clothed in a ragged brown garment of camel's hair; a dusty sheepskin, the "melotes" of the Egyptian anchorites, flung over his shoulders. His bare feet were shod in sandals of palmwood. The Emperor scanned him, waiting, unable to pronounce a word. "Do you remember," said a well-known voice. "Do you remember, Julian, how you came to me in the convent? Then I repulsed you. But I have not been able to forget you, because we are singularly like each other, singularly near each other...." The lad threw back his black hood, Julian saw the bright brown hair, and recognised Arsinoë. "Whence--why have you come? Why are you clad thus?" He still feared lest this might be some spirit, which would vanish as unexpectedly as it had appeared. In a few words Arsinoë narrated to him her fortunes since their last parting.