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suffered a recurrence of the old gastric trouble, had brooded overmuch on the past as if looking for something
that might have been done differently in order to avert the future. What future? he demanded of himself. There
seemed no logical reason to expect trouble. The controversy between monks and villagers had all but died. No
signs of turmoil came from the herdsman tribes to the north and east. Imperial Denver was not pressing its
attempt to levy taxes upon monastic congregations. There were no troops in the vicinity. The oasis was still
furnishing water. There seemed no current threat of plague among animals or men. The corn was doing well this
year in the irrigated fields. There were signs of progress in the world, and the village of Sanly Bowitts had
achieved the fantastic literacy rate of eight per cent?afor which the villagers might, but did not, thank the monks
of the Leibowitzian Order.
And yet he felt forebodings. Some nameless threat lurked just around the corner of the world for the sun to
rise again. The feeling had been gnawing at him, as annoying as a swarm of hungry insects that buzzed about
one’s face in the desert sun. There was the sense of the imminent, the remorseless, the mindless; it coiled like a
heat-maddened rattler, ready to strike at rolling tumbleweed.
It was a devil with which he was trying to come to grips, the abbot decided, but the devil was quite evasive.
The abbot’s devil was rather small, as devils go: only knee-high, but he weighed ten tons and had the strength of
five hundred oxen. He was not driven by maliciousness as Dom Paulo imagined him, not nearly as much as lie
was driven by frenzied compulsion, somewhat after the fashion of a rabid dog. He bit through meat and bone and
nail simply because he had damned himself, and damnation created a damnably insatiable appetite. And he was
evil merely because he had made a denial of Good, and the denial had become a part of his essence, or a hole
therein. Somewhere, Dom Paulo thought, he’s wading through a sea of men and leaving a wake of the maimed.
What nonsense, old man! he chided himself. When you tire of living,warcraft gold, change itself seems evil,buy ddo platinum, does it not?
for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. Oh there’s the devil, all right, but let’s not
credit him with more than his damnable due. Are you that life-weary, old fossil?
But the foreboding lingered.
“Do you suppose the buzzards have eaten old Eleazar yet?” asked a quiet voice at his elbow.
Dom Paulo glanced around with a start in the twilight. The voice belonged to Father Gault, his prior and
probable successor. He stood fingering a rose and looking embarrassed for having disturbed the old man’s
solitude.
“Eleazar? You mean Benjamin? Why, have you heard something about him lately?”
“Well, no, Father Abbot” He laughed uneasily. “But you seemed to be looking toward the mesa, and I
thought you were wondering about the Old Jew.” He glanced toward the anvil-shaped mountain, silhouetted
against the gray patch of sky in the west. “There’s a wisp of smoke up there, so I guess he’s still alive.”
“We shouldn’t have to guess,” Dom Paulo said abruptly.
“I’m going to ride over there and pay him a visit.”
“You sound like you’re leaving tonight.” Gault chuckled.
“In a day or two.”
“Better be careful. They say he throws rocks at climbers.”
“I haven’t seen him for five years,ddo power leveling,” the abbot confessed. “And I’m ashamed that I haven’t. He’s lonely. I’ll
go.
“If he’s lonely,cheap rs gold, why does he insist on living like a hermit?”