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the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A
rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same?a” He paused, looking at Cheroki. “I can tell by your blank look that you
haven’t heard this yet? No? All right, so you can’t say. No, no, Francis didn’t say that. All he said was?a” Abbot
Arkos tried to inject a slightly falsetto quality into his normally gruff voice. “All Brother Francis said was?a’I
met a little old man, and I thought he was a pilgrim heading for the abbey because he was going that way, and he
was wearing an old burlap sack tied around with a piece of rope. And he made a mark on the rock, and the mark
looked like this.’ ”
Arkos produced a scrap of parchment from the pocket of his fur robe and held it up toward Cheroki’s face in
the candle-glow. Still trying, with only slight success, to imitate Brother Francis: ” ‘And I couldn’t figure out
what it meant. Do you know?’ ”
Cheroki stared at the symbols and shook his head.
“I wasn’t asking you,” Arkos gruffed in his normal voice. “That’s what Francis said. I didn’t know either.”
“You do now?”
“I do now. Somebody looked it up. That is a lamedh, and that is a sadhe. Hebrew letters.”
“Sadhe lamedh?”
“No. Right to left. Lamedh sadhe. An ell, and a tee-ess sound. If it had vowel marks, it might be ‘loots,”
‘lots,” ‘lets,” ‘lets,” ‘latz,guild wars gold,” `litz’-anything like that. If it had some letters between those two, it might sound like
Lllll?aguess-who.”
“Leibo-Ho, no!”
“Ho, yes! Brother Francis didn’t think of it. Somebody else thought of it. Brother Francis didn’t think of the
burlap hood and the hangman’s rope; one of his chums did. So what happens? By tonight, the whole novitiate is
buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and the Beatus escorted our boy
over to where that stuff was and told him he’d find his vocation.”
A perplexed frown crossed Cheroki’s face. “Did Brother Francis say that?”
“NOO!” Arkos roared. “Haven’t you been listening? Francis said no such things. I wish he had, by gum; then
I’d HAVE the rascal! But he tells it sweet-and-simple, rather stupidly,buy runescape gold, in fact, and lets the others read in the
meanings. I haven’t talked to him myself. I sent the Rector of the Memorabilia to get his story.”
“I think I’d better talk to Brother Francis,” Cheroki murmured.
“Do! When you first came in, I was still wondering whether to roast you alive or not. For sending him in, I
mean. If you had let him stay out there on the desert, we wouldn’t have this fantastic twaddle going around. But,
on the other hand, if he’d stayed out there, there’s no telling what else he might have dug out of that cellar. I think
you did the right thing, to send him in.”
Cheroki, who had made the decision on no such basis, found silence to be the appropriate policy.
“See him,eve isk,” growled the abbot. “Then send him to me.”
It was about nine on a bright Monday morning when Brother Francis rapped timidly at the door of the
abbot’s study. A good night’s sleep on the hard straw pallet in his old familiar cell,cheap rs money, plus a small bite of unfamiliar
breakfast, had not perhaps done any wonders for starved tissue or entirely cleared the sun-daze from his brain,
but these relative luxuries had at least restored him to sufficient clarity of mind to perceive that he had cause to
be afraid. He was, in fact, terrified, so that his first tap at the abbot’s door went unheard. Not even Francis could
hear it. After several minutes, he mustered the courage to knock again.

“Libere me, Domine, ab vitiis meis . . . Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart I
may be desirous of only Thy will, and be aware of Thy summons if it come . . . ut solius tuae voluntatis mihi
cupidus sim, et vocatinonis tuae conscius si digneris me vocare. Amen.
“Set me free, O Lord, from my own vices, so that in my own heart…”
A sky-herd of cumulus clouds, on their way to bestow moist blessings on the mountains after cruelly
deceiving the parched desert, began blotting out the sun and trailing dark shadow-shapes across the blistered land
below, offering intermittent but welcome respite from the searing sunlight. When a racing cloud-shadow wiped
its way over the ruins, the novice worked rapidly until the shadow was gone, then rested until the next bundle of
fleece blotted out the sun.
It was quite by accident that Brother Francis finally discovered the pilgrim’s stone. While wandering
thereabouts, he stumbled over the stake which the old man had driven into the ground as a marker. He found
himself on his hands and knees staring at a pair of marks freshly chalked on an ancient stone:
The marks were so carefully drawn that Brother Francis immediately assumed them to be symbols, but
minutes of musing over them left him still bemused. Witch markings perhaps? But no, the old man had called:
“God-with-you,” as a witch would not. The novice pried the stone free from the rubble and rolled it over. As he
did so, the rock mound rumbled faintly from within; a small stone clattered down the slope. Francis danced away
from a possible avalanche, but the disturbance was momentary. In the place where the pilgrim’s rock had been
wedged, however, there now appeared a small black hole.
Holes were often inhabited.
But this hole seemed to have been so tightly corked by the pilgrim’s stone that scarcely a flea could have
entered it before Francis had overturned the rock. Nevertheless, he found a stick and gingerly thrust it into the
opening. The stick encountered no resistance. When he released it,eve isk, the stick slid into the hole and vanished, as if
into a larger underground cavity. He waited nervously. Nothing slithered forth.
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He sank to his knees again and cautiously sniffed at the hole. Having noticed neither an animal odor nor any
hint of brimstone, he rolled a bit of gravel into it and leaned closer to listen. The gravel bounced once, a few feet
below the opening,star wars galaxies credits, and then kept rattling its way downward, struck something metallic in passing, and finally
came to rest somewhere far below. Echoes suggested an underground opening the size of a room.
Brother Francis climbed unsteadily to his feet and looked around. He seemed alone, as usual, except for his
companion buzzard which, soaring on high, had been watching him with such interest lately that other buzzards
occasionally left their territories near the horizons and came to investigate.
The novice circled the rubble heap, but found no sign of a second hole. He climbed an adjacent heap and
squinted down the trail. The pilgrim had long since vanished. Nothing moved along the old roadway, but he
caught a fleeting glimpse of Brother Alfred crossing a low hill a mile to the east in search of firewood near his
own Lenten hermitage. Brother Alfred was deaf as a post. There was no one else in view. Francis foresaw no
reason whatever to scream for help, but to estimate in advance the probable results of such a scream, if the need