he outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow
through the dark forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan
pheasant, blazing in her best colours before Kali's statue; and the
langurs on their haunches, inside, playing with the walnut shells. Some
of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion,
behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat's reputation as miracle-worker
stood firm.

Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that
all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows
something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing
great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to
think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his
soul had come.

So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone
slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole
by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the
tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore
into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast
knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colours with
the seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again
and again; and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked
among the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys
brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys with the
spring. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and
many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent
their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long
their holy man had lived in Kali's Shrine at the head of the pass, they
answered, "Always."

Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for many
seasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud
and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into
thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali's Shrine stood above the
clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the
Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away under
a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and
bulged upward, but never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of
the valley.

All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little waters,
overhead fr