ort of
_samadhi_ meditation: every outline of every attitude, in that clear
Indian air, as sharp as if cut with scissors out of paper. And lying
close beside, cheek by jowl with the bodies still alive, the ashes of
dead bodies just burned or still burning on the Ghat. Life and Death
touching, running into one another, and nobody amazed: all as it should
be, and a matter of course!

England and India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education, politics
and Durbars:--the world with all its tumult and its roaring passes clean
over their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise and bustle do
not matter, do not trouble: they do not hear, they do not listen, they
do not even care. It is curious, this peace, this indifference, this
calm: it does not seem reality; it is like a thing looked at in a
picture, like a dream. And, somehow, as I gazed at it, mechanically
there came into my mind, as it were of its own accord, a story I had
read in some old navigator's "yarn," of the albatross, sleeping on the
great South Sea, in the fury of a storm, with its head beneath its wing.

CEYLON, 1912

I

A SPOILED CHILD

I

A SPOILED CHILD

BENEDICTION

_A bow to the mystical evening dance of the Rider on the Mouse,[6] who
whirling round his elephant trunk, smeared with wet vermilion, suddenly
shoots it straight up into the purple sky, and stands for a single
instant still, poised in the yellow twilight, as if to make a coral
handle for the white umbrella of the laughing Moon._

[Footnote 6: Ganesha.]

I

There is, in the western quarter, a land of lonely desolation, that
resembles a very sea, but of sand instead of brine, and rightly named
Marusthali, being a very home of death, sending back to the midday sun
rays hotter than his own, and challenging the midnight sky, with silent
ashy laughter, as though to say: What am I but the rival and reflection
of thyself, with bones instead of stars, and tracks of wasted skeletons
instead of a Milky Way. And there, upon a day, it came about that
Maheshwara was roaming with Parwati in his arms. And as they floated
swiftly on, over the dusty waste, they watched their own huge shadows
sweeping like the forms of clouds across the burning sand, exactly
underneath, for it was noon: and the surface of the desert shook and
quivered in the stillness, as if the wind, asleep, had, like a tired
traveller, sought refuge from the fury of the sun above their heads. And
all at