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 can not 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 XXXXX , 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 .
Kali begging-bowl daily evening husking morning overnight rice-sowing so-and-so threshing-floors