"I was seated, and given food and drink. This I needed. For three days I'd drunk nothing but water, and eaten only a few berries gathered here and there in the woods.

"I sat down cross-legged with them and ate the cooked meat they gave me, and she, my woman, my Daughter of Men, crushed up against me, as if daring anyone to challenge the pair of us, and then she spoke.

"She stood up, threw up her arms, and in a loud voice told them what she had seen.

Her language was simple. But she had plenty enough words to describe it—how she had come upon me on the banks of the sea and seen that I was naked and she had given herself to me in sanctity and worship, knowing I could not be a man of the earth.

"No sooner had my seed come into her than a magnificent light from above had filled the cave. She had rushed in fear from it, but I had walked out into it, fearless, knowing it, and before her eyes I changed so that she could see through me, yet still she saw me.

And I was grown tall, with immense white feathered wings! This vision—this creature through whom she could see as if through water—she saw only for an instant. Then I vanished. I was gone as surely as I sit here now. She had hovered, shivering, watching, praying to the ancestors, to the Creator, to the Demons of the Desert, to all powers for protection, when suddenly she had seen me again—transparent, to summarize her simple words, but visible, falling—winged and enormous—smashing towards earth in a fall that would have killed a man, though that is what I became—a man, solid as everyone could see, sitting in the dust.

" 'God,' I prayed. 'What do I do? What this woman has said is true! But I am no God.

You are God. What do I do?'

"No answer came from Heaven, not to my ears, not to my heart, not to my cumbersome and elaborate brain.

"As for the crowd of listeners, whom I judged to be about thirty-five, exclusive of all the children, no one spoke. Everyone was considering this. No one was quick to accept it. No one was going to jump forward and challenge it either. Something in my manner and posture held them aloof.

"No surprise. I certainly didn't cower or shiver or evince what I was suffering. I had not learnt to express angelic suffering through flesh. I merely sat there, aware that by their measure I was young, comely, and a mystery; and they were not brave enough to try to hurt me as they so often hurt others, to stab, or pierce, or burn me as I had seen them do enough times to their enemies, and to their own despised.