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was returning from far away.
    “So long as my body obeys me I shall always respond to the chief,” he said. “So tell him that I am following you, if it please God.”
    When he entered the chief’s room he found him still in prayer. He sat down on the mat, took out his beads, and waited.
    Spiral curves of odorous incense were escaping from the big white bed and were slightly dimming the light from the storm lamp. Everything in this room was clean and pure. The chief, clothed in a great white bou-bou, was now seated motionless, facing the east; without doubt it was the day’s final witness. The teacher settled himself in his place and, in thought, repeated with the chief, perhaps for the millionth time, the great profession of faith:
    “I bear witness that there is no god but God, and I bear witness that Mohammed is His prophet …”
    The chief finished his prayer. He turned toward the teacher and with both hands extended saluted him at length.
    “I should have given myself a pleasure and performed a duty in coming to visit you, if you had not one day expressly forbidden it,” the chief said. “You told me, as I remember, ‘Stability is at the same time a privilege and a duty for you princes of this world.’ ”
    “In effect,” the teacher rejoined, “you are the landmark and you are the recourse. Put that a little to the test, chief of the Diallobé. Has one man alone the right to monopolize what belongs to all? I answer, No. If the landmark moves, where do men go?”
    “They do not know.”
    “It is the same with the recourse, the presence of which reassures them.”
    The two men, the similarity of whose natures brought them together on essential points, were trying out once more the solid ground of their mutual admiration.
    “Master,” the chief asked, “am I a landmark sufficiently fixed, a recourse sufficiently stable?”
    “You are.”
    “Just so. I am the authority. Where I establish myself, the earth yields and is furrowed under my weight. I dig myself in, and men come to me. Master, they believe me to be a mountain.”
    “You are that.”
    “I am a poor thing, who trembles, and who does not know …”
    “It is true, you are that also.”
    “More and more, men come to me. What should I say to them?”
    The teacher knew what the chief was going to talk to him about. He had approached the subject with him a thousand times. The men of the Diallobé wanted to learn “how better to join wood to wood.” The mass of the country had made the reverse choice to that of the teacher. While the latter was setting at naught the stiffness of his joints, the pressure on his loins, setting his cabin at naught, and recognizing the reality only of Him toward Whom his thought mounted with delight at every instant, the people of the Diallobé were each day a little more anxious about the stability of their dwellings, the unhealthy state of their bodies. The Diallobé wanted more substance …
    Substance, weight … When his thought abutted on these words, the teacher shuddered. Weight! Everywhere he encountered weight. When he wanted to pray, weight opposed him, the heavy load of his daily cares over the upward sweep of his thought toward God, the inert and more and more sclerotic mass of his body over his will to rise, then to abase himself, then to rise again, in themotions of prayer. There were also other aspects of weight which, even as the Evil One, revealed diverse visages: the distraction of the disciples, the brilliant enchantments of their young imagination, as much as those essential properties of weight that were desperately eager to hold them to the earth, to keep them far from truth.
    He answered the chief’s question:
    “Tell them that they are gourds.”
    The teacher repressed a smile as he spoke. In general, the mischievousness of his thought amused him. The chief, however, was listening attentively, knowing by long custom what bases he must find for the venerable man’s changes of