The Sad Shepherd | Page 2

a silent ring,
stood at gaze while the robbers fumbled over their master.
"This is a stray dog," said one, "he has lost his collar, there is not even
the price of a mouthful of wine on him. Shall we kill him and leave him
for the vultures?" "What have the vultures done for us," said another,
"that we should feed them? Let us take his cloak and drive off his flock,
and leave him to die in his own time."
With a kick and a curse they left him. He opened his eyes and lay quiet
for a moment, with his twisted smile, watching the stars.
"You creep like snails," he said. "I thought you had marked my time
tonight. But not even that is given to me for nothing. I must pay for all,
it seems."
Far away, slowly scattering and receding, he heard the rustling and
bleating of his frightened flock as the robbers, running and shouting,
tried to drive them over the hills. Then he stood up and took the
shepherd's pipe, a worthless bit of reed, from the breast of his tunic. He

blew again that plaintive, piercing air, sounding it out over the ridges
and distant thickets. It seemed to have neither beginning nor end; a
melancholy, pleading tune that searched forever after something lost.
While he played, the sheep and the goats, slipping away from their
captors by roundabout ways, hiding behind the laurel bushes, following
the dark gullies, leaping down the broken cliffs, came circling back to
him, one after another; and as they came, he interrupted his playing,
now and then, to call them by name. When they were nearly all
assembled, he went down swiftly toward the lower valley, and they
followed him, panting. At the last crook of the path on the steep hillside
a straggler came after him along the cliff. He looked up and saw it
outlined against the sky. Then he saw it leap, and slip, and fall beyond
the path into a deep cleft.
"Little fool," he said, "fortune is kind to you! You have escaped from
the big trap of life. What? You are crying for help? You are still in the
trap? Then I must go down to you, little fool, for I am a fool too. But
why I must do it, I know no more than you know."
He lowered himself quickly and perilously into the cleft, and found the
creature with its leg broken and bleeding. It was not a sheep but a
young goat. He had no cloak to wrap it in, but he took off his turban
and unrolled it, and bound it around the trembling animal. Then he
climbed back to the path and strode on at the head of his flock, carrying
the little black kid in his arms.
There were houses in the Valley of the Mills; and in some of them
lights were burning; and the drone of the mill-stones, where the women
were still grinding, came out into the night like the humming of drowsy
bees. As the women heard the pattering and bleating of the flock, they
wondered who was passing so late. One of them, in a house where there
was no mill but many lights, came to the door and looked out laughing,
her face and bosom bare.
But the sad shepherd did not stay. His long shadow and the confused
mass of lesser shadows behind him drifted down the white moonlight,
past the yellow bars of lamplight that gleamed from the doorways. It
seemed as if he were bound to go somewhere and would not delay.
Yet with all his haste to be gone, it was plain that he thought little of
where he was going. For when he came to the foot of the valley, where
the paths divided, he stood between them staring vacantly, without a

desire to turn him this way or that. The imperative of choice halted him
like a barrier. The balance of his mind hung even because both scales
were empty. He could act, he could go, for his strength was untouched;
but he could not choose, for his will was broken within him.
The path to the left went up toward the little town of Bethlehem, with
huddled roofs and walls in silhouette along the double-crested hill. It
was dark and forbidding as a closed fortress. The sad shepherd looked
at it with indifferent eyes; there was nothing there to draw him. The
path to the right wound through rock-strewn valleys toward the Dead
Sea. But rising out of that crumpled wilderness, a mile or two away, the
smooth white ribbon of a chariot-road lay upon the flank of a
cone-shaped mountain and curled in loops toward its peak. There the
great cone was