All that night Oman scarcely slept; and yet the hours were not long. His mind wandered unrestrained through space. His thoughts were of a great and solemn beauty, of which he was scarcely conscious. In the first glimmer of dawn he left his rocky bed, and went out again into the open, this time turning his face to the east. And there was enacted before him another indescribable drama, which lasted till the sun was high in the heavens. Then he returned to eat another meagre meal of parched grain, supplemented with water. That bare sustenance seemed the only permissible food in the face of the ascetic splendors of sky and mountain-top. All through the day he moved quietly about the plateau, feeling more and more that it would be impossible now for him to leave the enchanted place. And the mountain, still watching how he moved and communed, humbly, within himself, sanctioned his presence, and bade him welcome to her undisciplined heights. Such was the beginning of his sojourn on the Silver Peak, which lasted not weeks nor months, but years—how many years, Oman never knew. The tale of this life might be compassed in a line, if one dealt only with events; but the mental phases through which he passed are scarcely to be transcribed. Life was sustained in him by the meagrest food. He lived as the Chelahs live: upon his soul; and was satisfied therewith. In the beginning, he was forced to return some dozen times to the hamlet in the valley, where he wove on Poussa’s loom, to earn grain enough to live on. But, early in his hermit’s life, he ploughed himself a field on the plateau, planted millet-seed therein, and, after that, reaped two scanty crops a year:—enough to live on. And from the period of his first harvest, he descended no more into the valley, where Poussa mourned for him as dead.