roadside; sometimes by a
mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir, where the Jogis, who are another misty
division of holy men, would receive him as they do those who know what
castes and divisions are worth; sometimes on the outskirts of a little
Hindu village, where the children would steal up with the food
their parents had prepared; and sometimes on the pitch of the bare
grazing-grounds, where the flame of his stick fire waked the drowsy
camels. It was all one to Purun Dass--or Purun Bhagat, as he called
himself now. Earth, people, and food were all one. But unconsciously
his feet drew him away northward and eastward; from the south to
Rohtak; from Rohtak to Kurnool; from Kurnool to ruined Samanah, and then
up-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only when
the rain falls in the hills, till one day he saw the far line of the
great Himalayas.

Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he remembered that his mother was of
Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way--a Hill-woman, always home-sick for
the snows--and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end
back to where he belongs.

"Yonder," said Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower slopes of the Sewaliks,
where the cacti stand up like seven-branched candlesticks-"yonder I
shall sit down and get knowledge"; and the cool wind of the Himalayas
whistled about his ears as he trod the road that led to Simla.

The last time he had come that way it had been in state, with a
clattering cavalry escort, to visit the gentlest and most affable of
Viceroys; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutual
friends in London, and what the Indian common folk really thought of
things. This time Purun Bhagat paid no calls, but leaned on the rail
of the Mall, watching that glorious view of the Plains spread out
forty miles below, till a native Mohammedan policeman told him he was
obstructing traffic; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law,
because he knew the value of it, and was seeking for a Law of his own.
Then he moved on, and slept that night in an empty hut at Chota Simla,
which looks like the very last end of the earth, but it was only the
beginning of his journey. He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the
little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out
on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet,
shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where
the sun strikes like a burning-glass;