I grew in grace with man--I hoped with God; from Beersheba to Dan I went about my Father's work. Faith could not shirk what Faith began. Sometimes qualms came. I looked askance on Bishop Daimbert's schemes to enhance His seat. The native Christians sighed they missed the Caliph's tolerance. Not that had hurt me, but the void which love will make if unemployed. I spent my strength to keep him quiet, and free the thoughts that he decoyed, Till woods and Rhone were out of range. I often wondered at the change In nature's child, in me. The formulæ were there. "God's ways are strange." Yet in my struggle with the powers of darkness I recalled the showers Of light that fought the undergrowth to catch the singing of the flowers. Time passed, and no one seemed to reck of Zenghi, the first Atabek, Though every year we failed to act the Saracens grew more compact. In vain I urged that we might fall, so slender was our human wall, So numberless the foe beside the Templars and the Hospital. The answer was that dyke and fosse were useless when we had the Cross, With other relics by the score, to guard against defeat or loss. My prophecies of coming ills fell on deaf ears and weakly wills. I did my best. You know I did, who saw me peer beyond the hills Where Karak like a lighthouse loomed at waves of sand that never spumed, The tideless main, an ocean-plain bare, petrified. Its silence boomed. I saw in all that vastitude, the one, the drab, the many-hued, No sign of life, no moving speck; and yet I knew that trouble brewed. I tortured every hour to find material things to prop behind-- Forgive me, God!--Your earthly realm. The need was great, for it was blind. The mathematics of Abul Hassan, three hundred years at school In Arabic philosophy, showed that the West was still a fool. Nay, gently, call her still a babe. How should she know that I, the Great, Had learned from savages to prate of compass and of astrolabe. Our miracles were not so sure to heal as Rhazes' simplest cure. His friends the moon and stars obeyed the rules that Abul Wafa made.