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 B