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!" Now and then some bold child would be allowed the honour,
and Purun Bhagat would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his
little legs could carry him, but the Bhagat never came down to the
village. It was laid out like a map at his feet. He could see the
evening gatherings, held on the circle of the threshing-floors, because
that was the only level ground; could see the wonderful unnamed green
of the young rice, the indigo blues of the Indian corn, the dock-like
patches of buckwheat, and, in its season, the red bloom of the amaranth,
whose tiny seeds, being neither grain nor pulse, make a food that can be
lawfully eaten by Hindus in time of fasts.

When the year turned, the roofs of the huts were all little squares of
purest gold, for it was on the roofs that they laid out their cobs of
the corn to dry. Hiving and harvest, rice-sowing and husking, passed
before his eyes, all embroidered down there on the many-sided plots of
fields, and he thought of them all, and wondered what they all led to at
the long last.

Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the wild
things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that wilderness
very soon the wild things, who knew Kali's Shrine well, came back to
look at the intruder. The langurs, the big gray-whiskered monkeys of
the Himalayas, were, naturally, the first, for they are alive with
curiosity; and when they had upset the begging-bowl, and rolled it round
the floor, and tried their teeth on the brass-handled crutch, and made
faces at the antelope skin, they decided that the human being who sat so
still was harmless. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and
beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in graceful
curves. They liked the warmth of the fire, too, and huddled round it
till Purun Bhagat had to push them aside to throw on more fuel; and
in the morning, as often as not,