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 Dass 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.

Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared