sun strikes like a burning glass or turns through dripping dark forests where the tree dress the trunks from head to heel and the calls to his mate and he met with their dogs and flocks of sheep each sheep with a little bag of on his back and wandering wood and and from coming into india on pilgrimage and of little solitary hill states furiously on ring and or the of a paying a visit or else for a long clear day he would see nothing more than a black bear and below in the valley when he first started the roar of the world he had left still rang in his ears as the roar of a rings long after the train has passed through but when he had put the pass behind him that was all done and was alone with himself walking wondering and thinking his eyes on the ground and his thoughts with the clouds one evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then � it had been a two days climb the second book � and came out on a line of snow peaks that 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 � wild cherry wild olive and wild but mostly which is the and under the shadow of the stood a deserted shrine to � who is who is who is sometimes against the swept the stone floor clean smiled at the grinning statue made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine spread his skin on a bed of fresh pine needles tucked his � his brass handled � under his and sat down to rest immediately below him the 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 all round it the tiny fields lay out like of on the knees of the mountain and cows no bigger than between the smooth stone circles of the floors looking across the valley the eye was deceived by the size of things and could not at first realize that the miracle of what seemed to be low on the opposite mountain flank was in truth a forest of pines saw an eagle across the gigantic hollow but the great bird 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 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 to welcome the stranger when he met 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 colored � a of the then all the of the village said think you he will stay with us and each did her best to cook the most meal for the hill food is very simple but with and indian corn and rice and red and little fish out the second book of the stream in the valley and honey from the like built in the stone walls and dried and and wild and of flour a devout woman can make good things and it was a full bowl that the priest carried to the was he going to stay asked the priest would he need a � a � to beg for him had he a blanket against the cold weather was the food good ate and thanked the 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 be fed for the village felt honored that such a man � he looked timidly into the face � should among them that day saw the end of 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 the miracle of 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 every morning the filled begging bowl was laid silently in the of the roots outside the shrine sometimes the priest brought it sometimes a lodging in the village and anxious to get merit up the path but more often it was the woman who had cooked the meal and she would murmur hardly above her breath speak for me before the gods speak for such a one the wife of so and so now and then some bold child would be allowed the honor and would hear him drop the bowl and run as fast as his little legs could carry him but the never came down to the village it was laid out 