“Strips of red and white hung about him like ribbons of a carnival, and he carried a pole with a row of teeth on it like the teeth of a dragon. His face was white and discomposed, after the fashion of the foreigners, so that they look like dead men filled with devils; and he spoke our speech brokenly.
“He said to me, ‘This is only a temple; I am trying to find a house.’ And then he told me with indelicate haste that the lamp outside his house was green, and that there was a red post at the corner of it.
“’I have not seen your house nor any houses,’ I answered. ‘I dwell in this temple and serve the gods.’
“’Do you believe in the gods?’ he asked with hunger in his eyes, like the hunger of dogs. And this seemed to me a strange question to ask, for what should a man do except what men have
