across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like
a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where
the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the
pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with
their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of
borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and
blanketed Lamas from Thibet, coming into India on pilgrimage,
and envoys of little solitary Hill-states, posting furiously on
ring-streaked and piebald ponies, or the cavalcade of a Rajah
paying a visit; or else for a long, clear day he would see
nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting below in the
valley. When he first started, the roar of the world he had left
still rang in his ears, as the roar of a tunnel rings long after
the train has passed through; but when he had put the Mutteeanee
Pass behind him that was all done, and Purun Bhagat was alone
with himself, walking, wondering, and thinking, his eyes on the
ground, and his thoughts with the clouds.

One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then--it
had been a two-day's climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks
that banded all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty
thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a
stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was
crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry,
wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the
Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a
deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is
sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.

Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning
statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the
shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles,
tucked his bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit,
and sat down to rest.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared
for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled
houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt.
All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of
patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than
beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the
threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was
deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-
flank, was in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat
saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great
bird dwindled to a dot ere it was half-way over. A few bands of
scattered clouds strung up and down the valley, catching on a
shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying out when they were
level with the head of the pass. And "Here shall I find peace,"
said Purun Bhagat.

Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down,
and as soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted
shrine, the village priest climbed up the terraced hillside to
welcome the stranger.

When he met Purun Bhagat's eyes--the eyes of a man used to
control thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl
without a word, and returned to the village, saying, "We have at
last a holy man. Never have I seen such a man. He is of the
Plains--but pale-coloured--a Brahmin of the Brahmins." Then all
the housewives of the village said, "Think you he will stay with
us?" and each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the
Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with buckwheat and Indian
corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out of the stream
in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in the
stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger,
and bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and
it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was
he going to stay? asked the priest. Would he need a chela--
a disciple--to beg for him? Had he a blanket against the cold
weather? Was the food good?

Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to
stay. That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl
be placed outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two
twisted roots, and daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the
village felt honoured that such a man--he looked timidly into
the Bhagat's face--should tarry among them.

That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat's wanderings. He had come
to the place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After
this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine,
could not tell whether he were alive or dead; a man with control
of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the
shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to
himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he
seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the
doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was
opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt
he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.

Every morning the filled begging-bowl was laid silently in the
crutch of the roots outside the shrine. Sometimes the priest
brought it; sometimes a Ladakhi trader, lodging in the village,
and anxious to get merit, trudged up the path; but, more often,
it was the woman who had cooked the meal overnight; and she
would murmur, hardly above her breath. "Speak for me before the
gods, Bhagat. Speak for such a one, the wife of so-and-so!"


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