And on the Eighth Day by Ellery Queen Page B

1874.
    “And in all these years,” Ellery asked incredulously, “no stranger has ever found his way here?”
    The Teacher reflected. “I believe I said earlier that that was so. But I had forgotten—there was one. It came to pass some forty years ago, during one of the Potter’s journeys with his assistants into the desert to obtain the special clay of which our prayer-scroll jars are made. A man was found lying in the sands; it was far north of Quenan. The man barely breathed. We hold life sacred; and in spite of our laws the Potter brought him here and he was nursed back to health. As it turned out, no harm was done, for his ordeal in the desert had erased from his mind all memory of the past, even his name. So we instructed him in our faith and our laws, and he lived in Quenan as one of us for the rest of his days. I had lost the habit of thinking of him as from the outside. He ceased some years ago.”
    One intruder in seventy years, and that one a blank page! Did the community know anything of the world outside? Very little, apparently. Once in a great while the Teacher or the Storesman saw, at or near Otto Schmidt’s store, a wagon which needed no beasts to pull it, like Elroï’s own; and, of course, for some years the people had caught occasional glimpses of flying machines that made a noise like distant thunder in the sky; but as to events … The old man shook his head. Even he, the Teacher, the oldest and most learned man in the Valley, knew nothing of the outside; nor did he wish to know.
    “Do you remember the Civil War?” Ellery asked.
    The sun-black forehead creased. “That would have to do with”—he paused, as if the next Word were unfamiliar—“soldiers? Who wore clothes of blue? I was a young child … There is in my mind a confused recollection of many marching men in blue … many people shouting … my father’s voice saying that these were soldiers coming back from the Rebellion …”
    Of World War I the old man knew nothing. And it was clear that he was equally ignorant of the second global war in a generation, the one currently being waged. Had not Otto Schmidt mentioned it? But the old man shook his head. “I do not speak to him of worldly things; he thinks we are wild men, hermits, and knows nothing of our community. We revere truth, but Quenan must remain hidden from men’s minds.”
    The Teacher showed no curiosity whatever about the war, and he seemed quite unconscious of the many United States laws he and his people were daily breaking, not to mention the laws of the state.
    Such was the story as Ellery pieced it together from the Teacher’s account and, later, from the scant records he was able to consult in the archives of the Chronicler …
    It was while he pored over the Chronicler’s records (his search for some reference in them to Josephus or Pliny was in vain, and the Chronicler had not even a dozing acquaintance with the names) that Ellery suddenly remembered. Both Josephus and Pliny the Elder had written of a religious order originating in the second century B.C. called the Essenes—yes, and now that he thought about it, so had the first century A.D. Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, Philo, who had also left an account of a non-Christian ascetic sect in the Egypt of his time whom he called the Therapeutae.
    The Essenes had practiced strict communal possession; scrupulous cleanliness—the frequent ceremonial washings of the Quenanites? The Essenes had abhorred lying, covetousness, cheating; they subsisted by pastoral and agricultural activities and handicrafts.
    Was it possible that the sect of Quenan had descended from the ancient Essenes? But there were important differences: the Essenes had abstained from conjugal relations; they had condemned slavery.
    Ellery wondered. Practices, even beliefs, might well have been lost or modified in the course of over two thousand years by a people with poor written records and the pressures of dispersion in a swiftly