The last obstacle was gone now. This place was fitted to be his abode. Here, far from the reach of his kind, he would dwell, till he had fashioned for himself a life that should be impervious to the shafts of wanton injustice and cruelty. Here he must fight the great battle of his dual nature, the outcome of which he himself could not foresee. This much settled, he turned to practical needs. After a long draught of water, he went back to his cave, and began the tedious process of building a fire after the fashion of the woodsman:—twirling a small, pointed stick, like a drill, into a close-fitting hole made in a piece of harder wood; feeding the heat with fine dust particles and crumbled dead leaves, till at last a flame appeared. It was a matter of an hour or more before his fire was ready; and by this time Oman was famished with hunger. He parched some of his millet on a flat stone, ate it with eagerness, and finished the meal with some mangoes gathered on the mountain side. Then, his faintness relieved, though his hunger was not wholly satisfied, he lay down and slept, waking again just as the sun was setting. The wonder of the following hour made an impression on him that was indelible: that bound him about with a spell which lasted as long as he dwelt upon the mountain top. Far away in the great west, from the palpitating flame in which the sun had set, spread a vast cloud of deepening crimson that slowly broadened, through the air and over the hills, clothing peak after peak with rose-gold, its misty glow shimmering over the whole earth, till every crag, every tree-top, every eagle’s wing, was transcended with the light. Gradually the color shifted, changed, sunk to a paler pink, encompassed with gray and violet shadows that shrouded the form of Night, who presently set on high her beacon: the diamond-pointed evening star, hanging, tremulous, in the deep-tinted west. And lo! as the swift Indian twilight died, the sister stars one by one flashed into view, till the sky was crowned with them, and the day lay dead under a velvet pall. Slowly Oman turned and walked back into his cave, his sense of exaltation changing into oppression: a realization of his infinite littleness before the immensity of the changeless world. Night after night such a scene as he had just witnessed was unfolded here, where no mortal eye was supposed to look on it. He felt himself an intruder in a holy shrine. His presence was the sacrilege of an inviolate fane, the retreating-place of God. And the loneliness, the oppression of his senses, was like the weight of the whole mountain on his soul. Still, through it all, was a joy: the joy of the knowledge of those things that no man knoweth, the splendor that man cannot parallel.