your stomach,
meditating on Brahma. The effect on the liver must be pretty much the
same.

He went to bed thinking of Upanishads, with the result that he dreamed of
tiger-shooting in the jungle.

Ah, yes, in the cold light of intellect, between doing and not doing a
thing there is but the difference of a word. That colorless negative does
nothing to alter the salient image of the thing. The fervency of his
resolve not to leave England called up as in a calenture the lands that
he was not to travel, the freedom that was not to be his.

The idea he had dismissed came back to him. He flew and it followed; he
veered and it waylaid him at every turn. An intolerable restlessness took
possession of him. He spent his days and a great part of his nights in
furious walking about the streets. The idea hounded him on; it stared at
him now from newspaper placards, it was whispered and murmured and
shrieked into his ears.

There was war in the Soudan.

He saw his idea illuminated, transfigured. It was Glory, a stern wingless
Victory, beckoning him across a continent. It no longer pursued him. It
had changed its tactics. It was coming to meet him; there was no
escaping.

He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross
and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the
outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour,
walking for walking's sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly
he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that
guard Cleopatra's Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out
of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop
had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.

Obelisk and sphinx--what were they doing by this gray river, under this
gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.

To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the
demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things,
where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where God and Nature are
more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts
as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was
supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.

London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.

But he would still be good for something out there. There were things
there that wanted