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old man, simply because of the part he had played, either by accident or by design of Providence, in the monk’s
stumbling upon the crypt and its relics. The pilgrim was only a minor ingredient, as far as Francis was
concerned, in a mandala design at whose center rested a relic of a saint. But his fellow novices had seemed more
interested in the pilgrim than in the relic, and even the abbot had summoned him, not to ask about the box,guild wars power leveling, but to
ask about the old man. They had asked him a hundred questions about the pilgrim to which he could reply only:
“I didn’t notice,” or “I wasn’t looking right then,” or “If he said, I don’t remember,” and some of the questions
were a little weird. And so he questioned himself: Should I have noticed? Was I stupid not to watch what he did?
Wasn’t I paying enough attention to what he said? Did I miss something important because I was dazed?
He brooded on it in the darkness while the wolves prowled about his new encampment and filled the nights
with their howling. He caught himself brooding on it during times of the day that were assigned as proper for the
prayers and spiritual exercises of the vocational vigil, and he confessed as much to Prior Cheroki the next time
the priest rode his Sunday circuit. “You shouldn’t let the romantic imaginations of the others bother you; you
have enough trouble with your own,” the priest told him, after chiding him for neglecting the exercises and
prayers. “They don’t think up questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the questions
on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be true. It’s ridiculous! I can tell you that the
Reverend Father Abbot has ordered the entire novitiate to drop the subject.” After a moment, he unfortunately
added: “There really wasn’t anything about the old man to suggest the supernatural?awas there?” with only the
faintest trace of hopeful wonder in his tone.
Brother Francis wondered too. If there had been a suggestion of the supernatural, he had not noticed it. But
then too, judging by the number of questions he had been unable to answer, he had not noticed very much. The
profusion of the questions had made him feel that his failure to observe had been, somehow, culpable. He had
become grateful to the pilgrim upon discovering the shelter. But he had not interpreted events entirely in terms of
his own interests, in accordance with his own longing for some shred of evidence that the dedication of his
lifetime to the labors of the monastery was born not so much of his own will as it was of grace, empowering the
will, but not compelling it, rightly to choose. Perhaps the events had a vaster significance that he had missed,
during the totality of his self-absorption.
What is your opinion of your own execrable vanity?
My execrable vanity is like that of the fabled cat who studied ornithology, m’Lord.
His desire to profess his final and perpetual vows?awas it not akin to the motive of the cat who became an
ornithologist??aso that he might glorify his own ornithophagy, esoterically devouring Penthestes atricapillus but
never eating chickadees. For,guild wars power leveling, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage, so was Francis called by his
own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as could be taught in those days, and, because there were no
schools but the monastic schools, he had donned the habit first of a postulant,age of conan gold, later of a novice. But to suspect
that God as well as Nature had beckoned him to become a professed monk of the Order?
What else could he do? There was no returning to his homeland, the Utah. As a small child,l2 adena, he had been
throwing the novice’s pilgrim into the twilight region, into the same perspective as the old man’s first appearance
as a legless black strip that wriggled in the midst of a lake of heat illusion on the trail, into the same perspective
as he had occupied momentarily when the novice’s world had contracted until it contained nothing but a hand
offering him a particle of food. If some creature more-than-human chose to disguise itself as human, how was he
to penetrate its disguise, or suspect there was one? If such a creature did not wish to be suspected, would it not
remember to cast a shadow, leave footprints, eat bread and cheese? Might it not chew spice-leaf, spit at a lizard,
and remember to imitate the reaction of a mortal who forgot to put on his sandals before stepping on hot ground?
Francis was not prepared to estimate the intelligence or ingenuity of hellish or heavenly beings,cheap l2 adena, or to guess the
extent of their histrionic abilities, although he assumed such creatures to be either hellishly or divinely clever.
The abbot, by raising the question at all, had formulated the nature of Brother Francis’ answer, which was: to
entertain the question itself,cheap rs gold, although he had not previously done so.
“Well, boy?”
“M’Lord Abbot, you don’t suppose he might have been?a”
“I’m asking you not to suppose. I’m asking you to be flatly certain. Was he, or was he not, an ordinary flesh-
and-blood person?”
The question was frightening. That the question was dignified by coming from the lips of so exalted a
person as his sovereign abbot made it even more frightening, though he could plainly see that his ruler stated it
merely because he wanted a particular answer. He wanted it rather badly. If he wanted it that badly, the question
must be important. If the question was important enough for an abbot, then it was far too important for Brother
Francis who dared not be wrong.
“I-I think he was flesh and blood, Reverend Father, but not exactly “ordinary.” In some ways,l2 power leveling, he was rather
extraordinary.”
“What ways?” Abbot Arkos asked sharply.
“Like-how straight he could spit. And he could read, I think.”
The abbot dosed his eyes and rubbed his temples in apparent exasperation. How easy it would have been
flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him
not to think otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possible, he had rendered such a
command ineffective before he uttered it. Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be
commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey. Like any
wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to disobey was possible and to enforce was not
possible. It was better to look the other way than to command ineffectually. He had asked a question that he
himself could not answer by reason, having never seen the old man,guild wars power leveling, and had thereby lost the right to make the
answer mandatory.
“Get out,” he said at last, without opening his eyes.
5
Somewhat mystified by the commotion at the abbey, Brother Francis returned to the desert that same day to
complete his Lenten vigil in rather wretched solitude. He had expected some excitement about the relics to arise,
but the excessive interest which everyone had taken in the old wanderer surprised him. Francis had spoken of the
which the youth himself had been making since mid-morning. He had decided at last that it would be easier to
remove and rebuild a section of the highest tier than to find a keystone that approximated the hourglass shape of
the gap in that tier. But, surely, the pilgrim would soon exhaust his patience and wander on his way.
Meanwhile,swg power leveling, Brother Francis rested. He prayed for the recovery of that inward privacy which the purpose of
his vigil demanded that he seek a clean parchment of the spirit whereon the words of a summons might be
written in his solitude?aif that other Immensurable Loneliness which was God stretched forth Its hand to touch
his own tiny human loneliness and to mark his vocation there. The Little Book,perfect world power leveling, which Prior Cheroki had left with
him on the preceding Sunday, served as a guide to his meditation. It was centuries old, and it was called Libellus
Leibowitz, although only an uncertain tradition attributed its authorship to the Beatus himself.
“Parum equidem te diligebam, Domine, juventute mea; quare doleo nimis . . . Too little, O Lord, did I love
Thee in the time of my youth; wherefore I grieve exceedingly in the time of my age. In vain did I flee from Thee
in those days….”
“Hoy! Over here!” came a shout from beyond the rubble mounds.
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Brother Francis glanced up briefly, but the pilgrim was not in sight. His eyes fell again to the page.
“Repugnans tibi, ausus sum quaerere quid, quid doctius mihi fide, certius spe, aut dulcius caritate visum
esset. Quis itaque stultior me…”
“Hey boy!” the cry came again. “I found you a stone, one likely to fit.”
This time when Brother Francis looked up, he caught a glimpse of the pilgrim’s staff waving signals to him
beyond the top of a rubble heap. Sighing the novice returned to his reading.
“O inscrutabilis Scrutater animarum,guild wars power leveling, cui patet omne cor, si me vocaveras, olim a te fugeram. Si autem nunc
velis vocare me indignum . . .”
And, irritably from beyond the rubble mound: “All right, then, suit yourself. I’ll mark the rock and set a
stake by it. Try it or not, as you please.”
“Thank you,” the novice sighed, but doubted that the old man heard him. He toiled on with the text:
“Libera me, Domine, ab vitiis meis, ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi cupidus sim,swg power leveling, et vocationis . . .”
“There, then!” the pilgrim shouted. “It’s staked and marked. And may you find your voice soon, boy. Olla
allay!”
Soon after the last shout faded and died, B rother Francis caught a glimpse of the pilgrim trudging away on
the trail that led toward the abbey. The novice whispered a swift blessing after him, and a prayer for safe
wayfaring.
His privacy having been restored, Brother Francis returned the book to his burrow and resumed his
haphazard stonemasonry, not yet troubling himself to investigate the pilgrim’s find. While his starved body
heaved, strained, and staggered under the weight of the rocks, his mind, machinelike kept repeating the prayer
for the certainty of his vocation:
