All that life was ended ; and he bore it no more ill-will or good-will than a man bears to a colourless dream of the night . He was a Sunnyasi -- a houseless , wandering mendicant , depending on his neighbours 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 . A five-pound note would have covered his personal expenses for food through any one of the many years in which he had been absolute master of millions of money . Even when he was being lionised in 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 sit at their evening meal . When the time came to make that dream true the Prime Minister took the proper steps , and in three days you might more easily have found a bubble in the trough of the long Atlantic seas , than Purun Dass among the roving , gathering , separating millions of India . At night his antelope skin was spread where the darkness overtook him -- sometimes in a Sunnyasi monastery by the roadside ; sometimes by a mud-pillar shrine of Kala Pir , where the Jogis , who are another misty division of holy men , would receive him as they do those who know what castes and divisions are worth ; sometimes on the outskirts of a 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 waked the drowsy camels . It 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 Samanah , and then up-stream along the dried bed of the Gugger river that fills only when the rain falls in the hills , till one day he saw 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 home-sick for the snows -- and that the least touch of Hill blood draws a man in the end back to where he belongs . `` Yonder , '' said Purun Bhagat , breasting the lower slopes of the Sewaliks , where the cacti stand up like seven-branched candlesticks - `` yonder I 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 clattering cavalry escort , to visit the gentlest and most affable of Viceroys ; and the two had talked for an hour together about mutual 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 a native Mohammedan policeman told him he was obstructing traffic ; and Purun Bhagat salaamed reverently to the Law , because he knew the value of it , 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 Himalaya-Thibet road , the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock , or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a 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 dripping , dark forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel , and the pheasant calls to his mate . And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs and flocks of sheep , each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back , and wandering wood-cutters , and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from Thibet , coming into India on pilgrimage , and envoys of little solitary Hill-states , posting furiously on ring-streaked and piebald ponies , or the cavalcade of a Rajah paying a visit ; or else for a long , clear day he would see nothing more than a black bear grunting and rooting 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 tunnel rings long after the train has passed through ; but when he had put the Mutteeanee Pass behind him that was all done , and Purun Bhagat 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-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 XXXXX 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 .
Dass Himalayan India Kurnool Sewaliks Thibet cavalcade hour piebald tree-ferns