'Name it to me, then!' 'Who can name it? Who can even see it, but those who are like Him from whom it comes? Them a long and stern discipline awaits. Would you be of them, you must, like the Highest who ever trod this earth, go fasting into the wilderness, and, among the wild beasts, stand alone face to face with the powers of Nature.' 'I will go where you shall bid me. I will turn shepherd among the Scottish mountains--live as an anchorite in the solitudes of Dartmoor. But to what purpose? I have listened long to Nature's voice, but even the whispers of a spiritual presence which haunted my childhood have died away, and I hear nothing in her but the grinding of the iron wheels of mechanical necessity.' 'Which is the will of God. Henceforth you shall study, not Nature, but Him. Yet as for place--I do not like your English primitive formations, where earth, worn out with struggling, has fallen wearily asleep. No, you shall rather come to Asia, the oldest and yet the youngest continent,--to our volcanic mountain ranges, where her bosom still heaves with the creative energy of youth, around the primeval cradle of the most ancient race of men. Then, when you have learnt the wondrous harmony between man and his dwelling-place, I will lead you to a land where you shall see the highest spiritual cultivation in triumphant contact with the fiercest energies of matter; where men have learnt to tame and use alike the volcano and the human heart, where the body and the spirit, the beautiful and the useful, the human and the divine, are no longer separate, and men have embodied to themselves on earth an image of the "city not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."' 'Where is this land?' said Lancelot eagerly. 'Poor human nature must have its name for everything. You have heard of the country of Prester John, that mysterious Christian empire, rarely visited by European eye?' 'There are legends of two such,' said Lancelot, 'an Ethiopian and an Asiatic one; and the Ethiopian, if we are to believe Colonel Harris's Journey to Shoa, is a sufficiently miserable failure.' 'True; the day of the Chamitic race is past; you will not say the same of our Caucasian empire. To our race the present belongs,--to England, France, Germany, America,--to us. Will you see what we have done, and, perhaps, bring home, after long wanderings, a message for your country which may help to unravel the tangled web of this strange time?' 'I will,' said Lancelot, 'now, this moment. And yet, no. There is one with whom I have promised to share all future weal and woe. Without him I can take no step.' 'Tregarva?' 'Yes--he. What made you guess that I spoke of him?'