At five o'clock in the morning of the sixth day I looked out.
The wind still whistled across the sky, but now without the
obstruction of any cloud. Full in front of my window Sirius flashed
with a whiteness that pierced the eye. A little to the right, the
whole constellation of Orion was suspended clear over a wedge-like
gap in the coast, wherein the sea could be guessed rather than seen.
And, travelling yet further, the eye fell on two brilliant lights,
the one set high above the other--the one steady and a fiery red, the
other yellow and blazing intermittently--the one Aldebaran, the other
revolving on the lighthouse top, fifteen miles away.
Half-way up the east, the moon, now in her last quarter and decrepit,
climbed with the dawn close at her heels. And at this hour they
brought in the Stranger, asking if my pleasure were to give him
clothing and hospitality.
Nobody knew whence he came--except that it was from the wind and the
night--seeing that he spoke in a strange tongue, moaning and making a
sound like the twittering of birds in a chimney. But his journey
must have been long and painful; for his legs bent under him, and he
could not stand when they lifted him. So, finding it useless to
question him for the time, I learnt from the servants all they had to
tell--namely, that they had come upon him, but a few minutes before,
lying on his face within my grounds, without staff or scrip,
bareheaded, spent, and crying feebly for succour in his foreign
tongue; and that in pity they had carried him in and brought him to
me.
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