meant it. So we set out perforce, Vanna leading steadily, as if
she knew the way. She never looked up, and her wish for silence
was so evident, that I followed, lending my hand mutely when the
difficulties obliged it, she accepting absently, and as if her
thoughts were far away.

Suddenly she quickened her pace. We had climbed about nine
hundred feet, and now the narrow track twisted through the rocks
- a track that looked as age-worn as no doubt it was. We
threaded it, and struggled over the ridge, and looked down
victorious on the other side.

There she stopped. A very wonderful sight, of which I had never
seen the like, lay below us. Rock and waste and towering crags,
and the mighty ruin of the monastery set in the fangs of the
mountain like a robber baron's castle, looking far away to the
blue mountains of the Debatable Land - the land of mystery and
danger. It stood there - the great ruin of a vast habitation of
men. Building after building, mysterious and broken, corridors,
halls, refectories, cells; the dwelling of a faith so alien that
I could not reconstruct the life that gave it being. And all
sinking gently into ruin that in a century more would confound it
with the roots of the mountains.

Grey and wonderful, it clung to the heights and looked with
eyeless windows at the past. Somehow I found it infinitely
pathetic; the very faith it expressed is dead in India, and none
left so poor to do it reverence.

But Vanna knew her way. Unerringly she led me from point to