The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1894-10-17

| cities far and near. and men and cities
! had stood up and honored him. Now
| he would let all these things go as a
man drops the cloak he no longer needs.
Behind him, as he walked through the
! city gates, an antelope skin and brass
handled crutch under his arm, and a
! begging-bowl of polished bron COCO de
Iner in his hand, barefoot. alone, with
eyes cast on the ground-behind him
they were firing salutes from the bas-
tions in honor of his happy successor.
Purun Dass smiled. All that life was
ended: and he bore it no more i'll will
or good will than a man bears to col
orless dream of the night. He was a
Sunnyasi-a houseless, wandering
mendicant, depending on his neighbors
for his daily bread; and so long as
there is a morsel to divide in India
neither priest nor beggar starves. He
had never in his life tasted meat. and
very seldom eaten even fish. five
pound note would have covered his
personal expenses for food through any
one of the many years in which he was
absolute master of millions OF money.
Even when he was being honized N
London he had held before him his
dream of peace and quiet-the long,
white, dusty Indian road printed all
over with bare feet, the incessant,
slow-moving traffic, and the sharp
smelling wood smoke curling up under
the fig trees in the twilight. where the
wayfarers sat at their evening meal.
When the time came to make that
dram true the prime minister took the
proper steps, and in three days
Won might more easily have found a
bubble in the trough of the big Allan
tic seas than Purun Dass among the
rowing, gathering, separating millions
OF India. At night his antelope skin
was spread where the darkness over
took him-sometimes in a Sunnyasi
monastery by the roadside; sometimes
by a mud pillar shrine of Kala Pr,
where the Jogis, who are another
misty division of holy men, would re-
ceive him as they do men who know
what castles and divisions are worth:
sometimes on the outskirts of d little
Hindu village, where the children
would steal up with the food their
parents had prepared; and sometimes
on the pitch of the bare grazing
grounds where the flame of his stick
fire walked the drowsy camels. 1t was
all one TO Purun DaSS-or Purun
Bhagat, as he called himself now.
Earth, people and food were all one.
But unconsciously his feet drew him
away northward and eastward from
the south TO Rohtak; from Rohtak to
Kurnool; from kurnool to ruined Sam
anah, and then upstream along the
dried bed of the Gugger river that fills
only when the rain falls in the hills,
till one day he sew the far line of the
great Himalayas.
Then Purun Bhagat smiled, for he
remembered that his mother was of
Rajput Brahmin birth, from Kulu way
"a hill woman, always homesick for
the snows-and that the least touch of
hill blood draws man at the end back
10 where he belongs. "Yonder," said
Purun Bhagat, breasting the lower
slopes of the Sewalilzs, where the cacti
stand up like seven-branched candle
sticks, ''yonder | shall sit down and get
knowledge;;" and the cool wind of the
Himalayas whistled about his ears as
he trod the road that led to Simla. The
last time he had come. that way it had
been in state, with a Gathering cavalry
escort, TO visit the gentlest and most
affable of viceroys; and the two had
talked for an hour together about mu-
tual friends in London, and what the
Indian common folk really thought of
things This time Purun Bhagat paid
no calls, but leaned on the rail OF the
Mall watching that glorious view of
the plains spread out forty miles below,
till native Mohammedan policeman
told him he was obstructing traffic; and
Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently
to the law, because he knew the value
Of 1t, and was seeking for a law of
his own. Then he moved on and slept
that night in an empty hut at Chota
Simla-which looks like the very last
end of the earth. but it was only the
beginning Of his journey. He followed
the Himalayan-Thibet road, the little
ten-foot track that is blasted out of
solid rock or strutted out on timbers
over CULTS thousand feet deep: that
dips into warm. wet, shut-in valleys
and climbs out across bare grassy hill
shoulders where the sun strikes like a
burning glass; or turns through drip
ping, dark forests where the tree ferns
dress the trunks from head to heel, and
the pheasant calls to his mate. And
he met Ghibetan herdmen with their
dogs and focks of sheep-each sheep
with 4 little bag OF borax on his back
and wandering wood cutters, and
cloaked and blanketed Lamas from
Thibet, coming into India on pill
grimage, and ENJOYS OF little soli-
tary hill states, posting furiouSly on
ring-stroai>ed and picbald ponies. or
the cavalcade Of a ralah paving a
visit; or else FOR clear long day he
would see nothing more than black
bear gruuting and roofing down be-
low II the valley. When he first
started. the roar Of the world he had
left still rang in his ears. as the roar
OF a tunnel rings long after the train
has passed through: but before he
had put the Mutteeanee pass behind
him that was all done. and Purun Bha-
cat was alone with himself. walking.
wondering and thinking, his eyes on
the ground and his thoughts with tie
clouds.
One evening he crossed the highest
pass he had met til then-it had been
a two davS' Cliuh-aDd ca-,,s ont ~, q
line Of snow peaks that belted all the
horizon-nountains from fifteen 20
twenty thousand feet high. and look