The Second Jungle Book
been a two-day’s climb--and came out on a line of snow-peaks that banded
all the horizon--mountains from fifteen to twenty thousand feet high,
looking almost near enough to hit with a stone, though they were
fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was crowned with dense, dark
forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but
mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the
deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala,
who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.
Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning statue,
made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine,
spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles, tucked his
bairagi--his brass-handled crutch--under his armpit, and sat down to
rest.
Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for
fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses,
with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the
tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of
the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth
stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the
eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was
in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop
across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it
was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down
the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying
out when they were level with the head of the pass. And “Here shall I
find peace,” said Purun Bhagat.
Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as
soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village
priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.
When he met Purun Bhagat’s eyes--the eyes of a man used to control
thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word,
and returned to the village, saying, “We have at last a holy man.
Never have I seen such a man. He is of the Plains--but pale-coloured--a
Brahmin of the Brahmins.” Then all the housewives of the village said,
“Think you he will stay with us?” and each did her best to cook the
most savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with
buckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out
of the stream in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in
the stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, and
bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and it was a
full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay?
asked the priest. Would he need a chela--a disciple--to beg for him? Had
he a blanket against the cold weather? Was the food good?
Purun Bhagat ate, and thanked the giver. It was in his mind to stay.
That was sufficient, said the priest. Let the begging-bowl be placed
outside the shrine, in the hollow made by those two twisted roots, and
daily should the Bhagat be fed; for the village felt honoured that such
a man--he looked timidly into the Bhagat’s face--should tarry among
them.
That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the
place appointed for him--the silence and the space. After this, time
stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell
whether he were alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a
part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight.
He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till,
at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body,
sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the
door was opening, 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, he would find a furry ape sharing his
blanket. All day long, one or other of the tribe would sit by his side,
staring out at the snows, crooning and looking unspeakably wise and
sorrowful.
After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like our
red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of his horns
against the cold stones of Kali’s statue, and stamped his feet when he
saw the man at the shrine. But Purun Bhagat never moved, and, little by
little, the royal stag edged up and nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat
slid one cool hand along the hot antlers, and the touch soothed the
fretted beast, who bowed his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed
and ravelled off the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe
and fawn--gentle things that mumbled on the holy man’s blanket--or would
come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take his
share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest and almost
the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big rabbity ears erect;
even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must needs find out what the
light in the shrine meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun
Bhagat’s lap, coming and going with the shadows of the fire. Purun
Bhagat called them all “my brothers,” and his low call of “Bhai! Bhai!”
would draw them from the forest at noon if they were within ear shot.
The Himalayan black bear, moody and suspicious--Sona, who has the
V-shaped white mark under his chin--passed that way more than once; and
since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no anger, but watched him,
and came closer, and begged a share of the caresses, and a dole of bread
or wild berries. Often, in the still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb
to the very crest of the pass to watch the red day walking along the
peaks of the snows, he would find Sona shuffling and grunting at his
heels, thrusting, a curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing
it away with a WHOOF of impatience; or his early steps would wake Sona
where he lay curled up, and the great brute, rising erect, would think
to fight, till he heard the Bhagat’s voice and knew his best friend.
Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have
the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but
all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement,
and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor.
The villagers saw the 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 from the trees, and underfoot along the ground, soaking through
the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, and
spouting in newly-torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the sun
came out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and the
rhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell which the Hill people call
“the smell of the snows.” The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then
the rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fell
in sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in