Where, in what land or on what planet was that optical incongruity now being borne?

He had scarcely remembered the legend, and recalled to his memory the dark vision he had seen in the rye field, when just before him a middle-sized man with a bare grey head and bare feet, who looked like a beggar, came silently out of the pine wood, walking with small, unheard steps. On his pale, deathlike face the black eyebrows stood out sharply. Nodding affably this beggar or pilgrim came noiselessly and sat down on the bench. Kovrin recognized in him the black monk. For a minute they looked at each other—Kovrin with astonishment; the monk in a kindly and, as on the previous occasion, in a somewhat cunning manner, and with a self-complacent expression.

“But you are a mirage,” Kovrin exclaimed; “why are you here and sitting in one place too? That is not in accordance with the legend.”

“That’s all the same,” the monk replied after a pause, in a low quiet voice, turning his face towards Kovrin. “The mirage, the legend and I are all the products of your excited imagination. I am a phantom.”

“Then, you do not exist?” Kovrin asked.

“Think what you like,” the monk answered with a faint smile. “I exist in your imagination, and your imagination is part of nature, consequently I exist in nature too.”

“You have a very old, clever and expressive face; just as if you had really existed for more than a thousand years,” Kovrin said. “I did not know that my imagination was capable of creating such phenomena. But why are you looking at me with such rapture? Do I please you?”

“Yes. You are one of the few who are justly called the chosen of God. You serve the eternal truth. Your thoughts, your intentions, your extraordinary science and your whole life bear the godlike, the heavenly stamp, as they are devoted to the reasonable and the beautiful, that is to say, to that which is eternal.”

“You said the eternal truth. . . . But can people attain to the eternal truth, and is it necessary for them if there is no eternal life?”

“There is eternal life,” the monk answered.

“Do you believe in the immortality of man?”

“Yes, of course. A great brilliant future awaits you men. And the more men like you there are on earth, the sooner this future will be realized. Without you, the servants of the first cause, you who live with discernment and in freedom, the human race would, indeed, be insignificant. Developing in a natural way it would long have waited for the end of its earthly history. You are leading it to the kingdom of eternal truth several thousand years sooner—and in this lies your great service. . . . You incarnate in yourselves the blessing with which God has honoured mankind.”

“But what is the object of eternal life?” Kovrin asked.

“The same as of all life—enjoyment. True enjoyment is knowledge, and eternal life offers numberless and inexhaustible sources of knowledge; this is the meaning of: ‘in my Father’s House are many mansions.’”

“If you only knew how pleasant it is to listen to you,” Kovrin said, rubbing his hands with satisfaction.

“I’m very pleased.”

“But I know that when you go away I will be troubled about your reality. You are a vision, a hallucination. Consequently I am physically ill, I am not normal.”

“And what of that! Why are you troubled? You are ill because you have worked beyond your strength and you are exhausted, which means that you have sacrificed your health to an idea, and the time is near when you will sacrifice your life to it too. What could be better? It is the object to which all noble natures, gifted from above, constantly aspire.”

“If I know that I am mentally diseased, can I believe in myself?”

“How do you know that the men of genius, who are believed in by the whole world, have not also seen visions? Scholars say now that genius is allied to insanity.