Talbot Mundy

“ I am but an old man seeking, through the cloud of ignorance, to do my duty, knowing what the duty is, but often misled by my own unwisdom. There were times, while my chela was growing, when I dreamed of triumphs for her among India’s millions. In those deluded moods it had appeared to me—although none had better right than I to know the contrary—that if she should seize on the imagination of the East, which might very easily be done, the East would rise out of its ignorance and teach the West. ”

“ Instant are its dawn, its noon and its accomplishment! Hope, if it is true hope, fills the mind, affording malice and deceitful dread no room. Hope lives in action. All the elements of hope are deeds done now!
“Deeds—the very echoes are the fruit of deeds! One stone laid on another in Hope’s name is greater service to the gods than all the pomp of conquest and the noise of prayer! A deed—who measures it? Who knows the limits of a mended wheel or reckons up the leagues it shall lay underfoot?—what burdens it shall bear?—whose destiny it shall await and serve? ”

“ It was growing dark, for one thing. At any moment the Hillman with the saw-edged knife and the haphazard notions about death might approach down the passage from the rear. Forward lay unknown territory, and a buttery smell that more than hinted at the presence of northerners, whose notions of hospitality might be less than none at all. He could be seen through the window-shutters, but could not see in through them. And he had in his pocket the lump of jade, that had lured men all the way from beyond Tilgaun into the hot plains that they hate. He wished he had left the jade somewhere. ”

“ Maitraya bowed his head, and even the other actors, outcaste and irreverent, held their breath. It sounded like magic. All India believes implicitly in magic. The words were Sanskrit, and probably only Ommony, Samding and the Lama understood them; but the ancient, sacred, unintelligible language only added to the mystery and made the spell more real.
None, not even Maitraya, moved or breathed until the chanting ceased. The Lama glanced at Ommony, who was so thrilled by the chela’s voice as to have forgotten for the moment that he held the saddhu’s scroll. ”

“ But as Ommony and Maitraya reached the stair-head the curtains facing them across the hall were parted, and a girl peeped through whom hardly a Wahabi ascetic would associate with thoughts of Paradise. She was much too paganly aware that life is laughter, and that men are amusing creatures, to be criticized by standard formula; and she looked like a mother o’ pearl Undine faintly veiled in mist—one of those fabled spirits who may receive a human soul, perhaps, someday, by marriage with a mortal—when she slipped out through the curtains and stood more or less revealed. ”

“ It was about ten minutes after dawn, the choicest hour in India, alive with cock-crow and the color-drenched solemnity of waking day, when the tired elephant came to a final halt in some sort of enclosure, and shuffled a slow measure to call the mahout’s attention to sore feet. At a sharp word of command the beast lay down, like a hillside falling. Diana sprang out through the curtains and Ommony followed, yawning and sitting down on the elephant’s forefoot to pretend to watch the mahout’s ingenious ministrations to a corn, while he surveyed the scene from under lowered eyelids. ”

“ He is almost fit to be a god. He needs only passion to awaken him. I can not understand this stone, which makes me dizzy to look into it, and dark with fear of myself. The chela makes me feel there is a future. I can look into his eyes and know that all wisdom is attainable. I will teach him passion, and he shall teach me pure desire.”
The Lama chuckled engagingly. His wrinkles multiplied and his smile was as full of amusement as a Chinese fisherman’s. “Ask him,” he said.
Vasantasena smiled at Samding—that same smile that had explained the secret of her influence. ”

“ He told himself it was the cold wind that made the goose-flesh rise, and all that night, shivering, he forced himself to believe that was the truth, following the sirdar’s pony along trails like a winding devil’s stairway that led alternately toward the sky and down again into a roaring underworld.
It was pitch-dark, but the deepest darkness lay ahead, where the enormous range of the Himalayas was a wall of silence ridged with faint silver where the starlight shone on everlasting snow. Darkness may be a substance for all that anybody knows about it ”

“ Let the Jew finance us, Gupta Rao! Let us go to Benjamin and use our joint persuasion to wheedle a decent contract out of him. I offer you a one-third interest! Commercialism—pah! The Jew is a commercialist, so we must feed him with rupees. The Lama, on the other hand, is ignorant of money’s value; he fails to see that it is good for the audience to pay a fair price for its education. As for us, let us take the middle way between two crass extremes. And if in the process we make a fortune, that will be no more than what is due to us. ”

“ There is nothing done in this life that is not balanced by justice in the lives to come and the ultimate is peace. So do. And not by another’s hand are deeds done; nor is the end accomplished without doing all that lies at the beginning. Thus the beginning is the end, and the end the beginning, as a circle having no beginning and no end, from which is no escape but by the Middle Way, which lies not yonder but at the feet of him who searches. Take the stone to Tilgaun, which is one stage of the journey to the place whence it came. ”

“ There is opportunity to serve, and he who overlooks it robs himself. Would you call the sun’s light sacrifice? But you are right when you say Hannah Sanburn is a noble woman. Her nobility is part of her. It works. It overcomes the fear of what the world might say. It conquers pride. It leaves adjustment of all consequences to the Higher Law. It keeps faith. It knows no malice. It is brave. My burden, when I took that child to Tilgaun, was all that I could bear, because I loved her and I feared for her: but Hannah Sanburn’s was no less—no atom less—when she returned the child to me. ”

“ Samding listened, standing for a while, then sat down cross-legged—off the mat—facing the Lama—head bowed humbly—not once moving until Diana came and sniffed his neck to find out what the matter was.
That stopped the Lama’s flow of speech. He glanced up at the gallery and called to Ommony in an absolutely normal tone of voice, as if he had entirely forgotten the whole incident of Prabhu Singh’s visit and the rebuke and all connected with it.
“Now again, my son. Make the dog do the acting again.” ”

“ There are other purposes, as well as crude vice, for which children may be stolen. His own sister—
“You say Tsiang Samdup is better than both of us?” he remarked at last, surprised at the evenness of his own voice.
“Much better!” said Benjamin. “Ah, Ommony—I see your face. Old I am. Blind I am not. But listen: have you seen what happens to the children whose parents die or desert them? Not the children of the poor; the little girls who are well born, who feel things that other children do not feel. I am a Jew—I know what feeling is! Hah! I have seen animals in cages who were happier! ”

“ That Tashi Lama said to me: ‘My son, it may amuse you to linger for a few lives on the lower path; for you are strong, and the senses riot in you; and it is not my duty to impose on you one course of conduct, if you prefer another. It is very difficult to rise against the will, but very easy if the will directs.’ And I, because I loved him, answered I would do his bidding. But he said: ‘Nay. Each man must, each minute, make his destiny. It is your own will, not mine, that directs you. Shall I fight your will, and force you to attempt the better way? ”