Lost trumpet

112
THE LOST TRUMPET
contents. And these contents seemed but the sum
of a grey nothingness because of the one article that
was missing. It had been crushed out, dropped by
the wayside, or forgotten long before. It was love.
“He sat down by a wayside pool and laid his head
in his hands in a surly dissatisfaction, knowing that.
But the journey had still to be continued. So, clutch¬
ing his purse, glancing right and left in search of foot¬
pads, he went on. He walked limpingly, and choleric
because of his corns and the hot weather, and so
walking, rounded a corner—and there, in front of
him, like Apollyon in Bunyan, he glimpsed for a
fleeting moment the giant Robber. And the Robber
yawned, and surveyed him, and lifted his club, and
pounded him, him and his purse, into little frag¬
ments indistinguishable from the little fragments of
his elder Brother.’’
Far out in the desert the rim of the moon had
uprisen, and there, a mere rim, seemed to halt, as
though the earth had ceased to rotate and the satellite
gazed down on a world as tideless and immovable
as itself. Pelagueya touched my arm.
“There was a Third Brother.”
“Ah, yes. Now, by yet another route—if route it
could be called—came on the Third Brother. Through
no such carefully mapped and planned country as
his brothers did this third one come. For long he
wandered in a land of flowering bogs with the gay
yellow of the poison flower a startling colour amidst
the tufts of green, and the calling of strange birds
heard across stagnant meres. Sometimes by moun-