f she knew the way.
She never looked up, and her wish for silence was so evident, that I
followed, lending my hand mutely when the difficulties obliged it, she
accepting absently, and as if her thoughts were far away.

Suddenly she quickened her pace. We had climbed about nine hundred feet,
and now the narrow track twisted through the rocks--a track that looked
as age-worn as no doubt it was. We threaded it, and struggled over the
ridge, and looked down victorious on the other side.

There she stopped. A very wonderful sight, of which I had never seen the
like, lay below us. Rock and waste and towering crags, and the mighty
ruin of the monastery set in the fangs of the mountain like a robber
baron's castle, looking far away to the blue mountains of the Debatable
Land--the land of mystery and danger. It stood there--the great ruin
of a vast habitation of men. Building after building, mysterious and
broken, corridors, halls, refectories, cells; the dwelling of a faith so
alien that I could not reconstruct the life that gave it being. And all
sinking gently into ruin that in a century more would confound it with
the roots of the mountains.

Grey and wonderful, it clung to the heights and looked with eyeless
windows at the past. Somehow I found it infinitely pathetic; the very
faith it expressed is dead in India, and none left so poor to do it
reverence.

But Vanna knew her way. Unerringly she led me from point to point, and
she was visibly at home in the intricacies. Such knowledge in a young
woman bewildered me. Could she have studied the plans in the Museum?
How else should she know where the abbot lived, or where the refractory
brothers were punished?

Once I missed her, while I stooped to examine some scroll-work, and
following, found her before one of the few images of the Buddha that the
rapacious Museum had spared--a singularly beautiful bas-relief, the hand
raised to enforce the truth the calm lips were speaking, the drapery
falling in stately folds to the bare feet. As I came up, she had an air
as if she had just ceased from movement, and I had a distinct feeling
that she had knelt before it--I saw the look of worship! The thing
troubled me like a dream, haunting, impossible, but real.

"How beautiful!" I said in spite of myself, as she pointed to the image.
"In this utter solitude it seems the very spirit of the place."

"He was. He is," said Vanna.

"Explain to me. I don't understand. I know so little o