The Rejoicing Desert

Extract

Blessed Albertus Magnus was one of those unfortunate saints who get covered up with odd stories like an old castle with ivy. The castle is as solid as the rock on which it is built, but what with the thickness of the ivy and the chattering of the jackdaws that live in it, you hardly get a chance of seeing it or speaking about it sensibly, and it runs the risk of getting forgotten altogether. There was an amazing quantity of such overgrowth and bickering about Blessed Albertus, even in his own lifetime. People even said he was a wizard. As if a Blessed could be a wizard ! They painted a white horse on the side of a tower in the market-place of his native town and said that as a little boy Albert, and Albert alone, could lead that horse about. They made out that he had a magic cup in which he had but to pour wine or water and the sick man who sipped it was cured. They pretended that beside his own cell, in the Convent of Cologne, he had a little room hidden away and full of strange animals and fantastic instruments and uncanny vessels of glass. They said there was a scarlet curtain in one corner of it behind which stood a Talking Figure which could say “Salve ! Salve ! Salve !” and had taken Blessed Albertus thirty years to make. They boasted that the Four Crowned Martyrs, the patron saints of masons, had traced him out the plans of Cologne Cathedral—though all the world knows that it was Gerard of Riel, who travelled in France first and worked in a timber-yard afterwards—to whom the plans of Cologne Cathedral are owing.