hagat 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,