CHAPTER IXTHE STRUGGLE ON THE HEIGHT
In all great mountain ranges there are what might be called heights of man and heights of nature. There are always hills that seem to invite the puny human agility: that hold at their summits resting-places whence men may obtain their “view” and begin their descent again, filled with pride at the conquest of inconsequent difficulties. But there are other heights that were not made for such: places which, even should man attain to them, refuse him his vain reward, bind him about with a spell of bewildered awe, and, if he safely reach his earth-kennel once more, leave him with the sense that he has been refused his due.
Heights such as these owe nothing to humanity. They are the retreating-places of defeated nature. To man they are not natural. Their high glory is not for him. Towering into regions above slow-drifting clouds, where sun and stars and moon lean close on high, they are in communion with eternity. Nor is their secret of the ages to be borne away and exploited in the depths below.
Such a height as this rose up beyond the little hamlet of the mountain stream. Its peak, a spirelike pinnacle,not so lofty when compared with Himalayan or even Alpine heights, rose up from a high, rounded plateau which itself lay above the tops of the surrounding hills. On the far side of the mountain the slope ran gradually down to the basin of a tiny mountain lake, that lay five hundred feet above the valley level. But on the south end of this heavenly plateau, rocks jutted down in a vast, tumbling mass, to a depth of three thousand feet. Alone in its far summit, sunlit, glorious, the strange mountain top might have been hailed king of the whole range. And, indeed, it was one of the few mountains of the Vindhyas distinctive enough to possess a name. The valley dwellers called it the “Silver Peak”; and its name fitted it well. The eastern slope was densely wooded. The rocks at the base of the peak on the plateau were filled with caves; yet animals and reptiles shunned these easy abodes. Only sure-flying birds, eagles and falcons and kingfishers and floriken, swept through its forests and over its height, unawed by the inviolable stillness. But this stillness, unbroken since the day the mountain rose from the earth’s seething surface, was something to be feared. Here man had been defeated in the moment of his triumph. His blatant voice, lifted upon this royal height, had shrunk to a faint whisper; and he had fled his sacrilege in shame.
It was midday on the height. Overhead blazed a September sun, infinitely brilliant. The plateau, bathed in gold, lay drowsy in the noontide. Below, a few shreds of silvery cloud clung about the rocks,veiling higher mysteries from the lower world. The loneliness was absolute. Neither eagle nor cormorant dared the sun at this hour; and it seemed as if living things had never existed here. Not one world-murmur sent its vibration through the tranquil atmosphere. Man and the works of man were forgotten or undreamed-of. Here was such peace as the flesh-clothed spirit cannot know: the peace that terrifies, because it was declared primevally of God.
Up to this height from the depths below came Oman, mounting slowly, all but overcome with the long toil of nearly twenty hours. From the torrent, through cloud fringes, out of forest darkness came he, upborne by his strange will. Reaching at last the level, he walked on it till he emerged from the trees into an open space, on one side of which rose the rocky wall of the peak, pierced with its little caves. Far to the east, down the long, slow slope, twenty-five hundred feet below, the lake lay glittering with golden ripples. Beyond it hills rolled, on and on, till, in the far morning-land, they ended in a deep, violet mist.
Here, in the open, Oman paused and looked. As he stood, gaunt and tall, clad in the floating, tattered raiment of some long-dead Bhikkhu, in his right hand a stout staff, in his left a small bag of millet—Poussa’s gift, the two spirits in him looking out through his great eyes, there was no suggestion of triumph about him. He was overcome by the wonderful beauty of the surrounding scene; but he also betrayed a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of mind, as well as of body.The mountain lazily surveyed him as he stood, and perceived that he carried the key to the gate of solitude. He was not to be denied admittance. Deserted of mankind he had come unto Nature, asking shelter from the world; and Nature, pitying, could not refuse.
Still actuated by the spirit that seemed distinct from himself, Oman moved slowly toward the rocky ridge, and entered one of the caves that pierced it. Here was a place that would shelter him from storms; and here, should nights prove cold, a fire would always live. In the cave’s mouth he sat, for a long time, musing on the possibilities of making an abode in this strange place. There seemed to be only one vital lack. There was no sign of water anywhere about. Should that not exist, he must descend again. This thought caused his heart fairly to sink. Obeying a quick impulse, he set out in search of water; and it was nearly an hour before, fifty feet down the eastern slope, he found a spring that sent a tiny, falling thread down in the direction of the lake, till it was lost under the earth, a long way below.
The last obstacle was gone now. This place was fitted to be his abode. Here, far from the reach of his kind, he would dwell, till he had fashioned for himself a life that should be impervious to the shafts of wanton injustice and cruelty. Here he must fight the great battle of his dual nature, the outcome of which he himself could not foresee.
This much settled, he turned to practical needs. After a long draught of water, he went back to his cave,and began the tedious process of building a fire after the fashion of the woodsman:—twirling a small, pointed stick, like a drill, into a close-fitting hole made in a piece of harder wood; feeding the heat with fine dust particles and crumbled dead leaves, till at last a flame appeared. It was a matter of an hour or more before his fire was ready; and by this time Oman was famished with hunger. He parched some of his millet on a flat stone, ate it with eagerness, and finished the meal with some mangoes gathered on the mountain side. Then, his faintness relieved, though his hunger was not wholly satisfied, he lay down and slept, waking again just as the sun was setting.
The wonder of the following hour made an impression on him that was indelible: that bound him about with a spell which lasted as long as he dwelt upon the mountain top. Far away in the great west, from the palpitating flame in which the sun had set, spread a vast cloud of deepening crimson that slowly broadened, through the air and over the hills, clothing peak after peak with rose-gold, its misty glow shimmering over the whole earth, till every crag, every tree-top, every eagle’s wing, was transcended with the light. Gradually the color shifted, changed, sunk to a paler pink, encompassed with gray and violet shadows that shrouded the form of Night, who presently set on high her beacon: the diamond-pointed evening star, hanging, tremulous, in the deep-tinted west. And lo! as the swift Indian twilight died, the sister stars one by one flashed into view, till the sky was crowned with them, and the day lay dead under a velvet pall.
Slowly Oman turned and walked back into his cave, his sense of exaltation changing into oppression: a realization of his infinite littleness before the immensity of the changeless world. Night after night such a scene as he had just witnessed was unfolded here, where no mortal eye was supposed to look on it. He felt himself an intruder in a holy shrine. His presence was the sacrilege of an inviolate fane, the retreating-place of God. And the loneliness, the oppression of his senses, was like the weight of the whole mountain on his soul. Still, through it all, was a joy: the joy of the knowledge of those things that no man knoweth, the splendor that man cannot parallel.
All that night Oman scarcely slept; and yet the hours were not long. His mind wandered unrestrained through space. His thoughts were of a great and solemn beauty, of which he was scarcely conscious. In the first glimmer of dawn he left his rocky bed, and went out again into the open, this time turning his face to the east. And there was enacted before him another indescribable drama, which lasted till the sun was high in the heavens. Then he returned to eat another meagre meal of parched grain, supplemented with water. That bare sustenance seemed the only permissible food in the face of the ascetic splendors of sky and mountain-top. All through the day he moved quietly about the plateau, feeling more and more that it would be impossible now for him to leave the enchanted place. And the mountain, still watching how he moved and communed, humbly, withinhimself, sanctioned his presence, and bade him welcome to her undisciplined heights.
Such was the beginning of his sojourn on the Silver Peak, which lasted not weeks nor months, but years—how many years, Oman never knew. The tale of this life might be compassed in a line, if one dealt only with events; but the mental phases through which he passed are scarcely to be transcribed. Life was sustained in him by the meagrest food. He lived as the Chelahs live: upon his soul; and was satisfied therewith. In the beginning, he was forced to return some dozen times to the hamlet in the valley, where he wove on Poussa’s loom, to earn grain enough to live on. But, early in his hermit’s life, he ploughed himself a field on the plateau, planted millet-seed therein, and, after that, reaped two scanty crops a year:—enough to live on. And from the period of his first harvest, he descended no more into the valley, where Poussa mourned for him as dead.
To one choosing, or chosen for, the life Oman had elected, dwelling in utter solitude from year to year, two courses are open. If the physical in him predominates, he draws out of the nature around him all that is animal, savage, or untamed, gradually loses his powers of thought and articulation, finally, the very habits of man, becoming a creature wilder than the wild things themselves. But, if he be of the spiritual type, a dreamer or religious fanatic, he draws toward him the soul of Nature; his mind expands as his body dwindles; and it is said that strange psychicalpowers come to him. With Oman, in the beginning, it seemed doubtful which he was to become: beast or angel. Buddhism had not uprooted the passion and the animal instincts of his dual spirit; but it had at least opened his eyes to the spiritual life. For many months—two, or perhaps three years, even—the battle of the two forces raged within him. And probably it was the mere fact that he was able for so long a time to retain spiritual remembrance, that gave him victory in the end. At first his moods alternated. For days at a time he would sit wrapped in a state of impenetrable calm, meditating as Gautama had meditated. Then, without any warning, the brute in him would rise, and, driven by it, he would range through the mountain woods like a demon, climbing, goat-like, over crags and precipices, and performing feats of physical strength that were almost superhuman. Again, suddenly, in one breath, he would break into a tempest of tears and cries, and, flinging himself on the ground, wherever he happened to be, would lie there, shaken with sobs, till sheer exhaustion brought quiet. Reaction never failed him, however; and it was always the same. Quietly, like a numb, dazed creature, he would rise and drag himself back to the open summit and his cave, and there would sleep, for an uncalculated period. When he woke he ate; and, in the torpor that followed, the great calm would descend on him again.
His tempests were always a source of deep trouble and dejection to him. That incomprehensible womanishnessthat lived within him he half despised and half deplored. When she was uppermost, she was pitiable enough. Her high, wailing voice roused the dreariest echoes among the surrounding rocks; and one hearing them might have fancied himself listening to a chorus of damned souls wandering along the road to Kutashala Mali. This weaker spirit used, in the beginning, to be roused by the thunderstorms which, from time to time, raged across the heights. With the first hissing fire-streak that crossed the sky, Oman’s frame would be shaken by a quiver of terror, and he would cower away into his rude habitation, and, covering his face, remain moaning and trembling with every crash, every blaze of lightning, every fresh onslaught of cold rain. To him it was as if these phenomena brought back some experience of the dimly veiled past, when, in words that smote his ears like the near thunder itself, he had heard pronounced on him a doom, and had thenceforth been plunged into deepest night.
After the passing of the storm, when the stars came radiantly forth upon the newly refreshed sky, or the sun shone through an upstretched, radiant bow, there would steal upon the stricken creature of the cave a sense of comfort and consolation almost repaying the evil hour of fear. At such times, Oman would put away his sense of wretchedness and shame; and his heart would open out in praise. What he should praise, whom, which of the gods his life had known, he could not tell. None of them all—Siva, Vishnu, Indra, not the Buddha himself—could satisfy his new,groping sense. But the searching, seeking, wondering after the unknown, the greatly desired, usually led him back into his state of meditation, where he could claim himself again a man.
In the end, it was this search that brought him into the kingdom. Brahman born, a Vedic student, instructed also in the three great philosophic systems, and, later, introduced to Buddhism, he had at hand a great fund of religion, and a variety of hypotheses on which to meditate. As soon as he began to perceive that he must find some creed to lean upon, he set to work consistently to analyze and compare these different systems. And from that time, when he felt himself occupied with a real work, the tempests of his unconquered self came less often, and were far less fierce, till, by degrees, they ceased entirely, and he found himself master of his solitude. Now, truth began to disclose herself to him. Gradually he discovered that he understood a few things. He perceived life to be a period of trial and probation. The beginning and the end are good. One comes into the world innocent, pure at heart, untroubled by sordid doubts and fears. One leaves it calmly, having ceased to desire the things of life. In the interval many phases hold possession of the soul: ambitions of various kinds (lusts and loves, for which one pays with blood and tears), and the worshipping of many idols. But one by one these break and crumble away. Men perceive that they are false, and cease to search for them; and their lack—the loss of riches, power, even love,—arenot to be felt as evils. The soul is self-sufficient if it know its god. This is the story of life.
Afterwards came higher considerations:—cause, purpose, natural law, finality. Deep were Oman’s meditations on these matters, and strange the answers that he found. The twenty-five principles of the philosophy of Kapila he reduced to two—matter and essence. From the combination of these the universe has risen. The great fountain of Spirit, situate in the heart of the rolling worlds, sends forth a constant spray, each drop of which is a soul, which, entering a material form, begins its long pilgrimage back, through imprisoning matter, into the fountain-head again. Into such form, after long and troubled study, did Oman work his truths; and then, still unsatisfied with the infinitude of existence involved in the idea, sought further solution to unsolvable things.
Six, seven, eight years went by; and Oman was no longer young. Yet his appearance was still not that of a man. His face was without any trace of beard; nor was his expression one borne by world-dwellers. His eyes glowed with an inward fire. There were certain lines about his mouth and eyes that gave his features the droop of constant melancholy. His form was tall and gaunt; but his fine skin was still untoughened by exposure to sun and wind. Save for a cloth about the loins, he now went unclothed, unconscious of nakedness, exposed to no observing eyes. His muscles stood well up on his lean body, for he was a tiller of the soil. In his wholelife there on the mountain he had never known one day’s sickness; nor did it occur to him to consider health in the light of good or evil. His solitude had effect on him in infinite ways; but he kept himself from forgetting speech by frequently talking aloud. His thoughts, however, were not at all those of men. He made companions out of the natural objects round him, and regarded the phenomena of nature as beautiful scenes in which he himself had a part. He called greetings to the rising sun and to the moon, which looked on him with jovial, distorted face. Wild creatures that lived in the lower woods—bears, small, burrowing animals, even snakes, moved near him without fear and without any threat of battle. During his long residence in the open, he had never knowingly injured a single sentient thing; and for this his reward came in the shape of companionship with the wild. The tenth year of his mountain solitude had passed, when, suddenly, all things were changed for him.
In some mysterious way, how, cannot be explained, for the rumor could have had no other origin than the wind, it was spread among the scattering mountain villages that, on the summit of the Silver Peak, there dwelt a Chelah, or hermit, of great holiness and wonderful powers. And thereupon pilgrimages thither began.
The meeting of Oman and the first stranger that penetrated his solitude was unique. It was more than ten years since Oman had looked upon the face of one of his kind or heard the sound of any voiceother than his own. He had for a long time felt neither need nor desire for companionship; and his mind had become quite deadened to the necessity of reëntering the world. One afternoon, returning from a short walk down the eastern slope after fruit, he found himself face to face with a man, standing near the entrance of his cave, who, seeing him, began to prostrate himself rapidly. Oman stopped perfectly still, looking at him with wonderment in his face. After a while, seeing that the holy one did not speak, the man began:
“O most excellent, reverend sir, accept my worshipful homage of your learning and holiness. I am come to ask of you the fate of my wife, who is sick of the white plague. All doctors I have rejected, and come to you, on the top of this amazingly high mountain, to ask your aid. And, that I may not seem to be wanting in reverence, I bring with me a jade anklet,—which may the reverend One accept!” and forthwith he proffered his gift.
Oman looked at him long and steadfastly, striving to master the emotions that were welling up within him, the foremost of which seemed to be acute displeasure. He hesitated also to speak; for he realized, on listening to the speech of the man, that his own articulation had become almost unrecognizably altered. An answer seemed, however, to be a necessity; so, presently, he nerved himself to the effort, and said, slowly, with great difficulty:
“Do not bow down before me, O man, nor beforeany being like yourself. Return to your wife and keep your place beside her bed; nor neglect to obtain doctors for her in her sickness. I will not take your gift, for what need have I of jade? Return to your dwelling and trouble me no more.”
Vainly the man protested, tried propitiation, prayer, demand. Oman would pretend to no knowledge concerning the sickness of his wife. But when the stranger asked for food before beginning his arduous homeward journey, Oman could not refuse him, but offered what he had; and, when they had eaten together, the man continually exclaiming that he was not worthy of the honor, he departed, unsatisfied, carrying with him his jade anklet.
Oman was left in a state of great agitation. The single hour of human companionship had brought down on him, in a torrent, all the old desires, fears, worries, hopes, in fine the inevitable emotions of human life; and he was whirled into the stream of the old problem. That day, and the next, and three or four nights, were filled with restlessness. Then, as time passed, and he found himself unmolested, calm returned, and the thoughts of the other life faded again.
Nevertheless, the spell had been broken, and he was not destined to a much longer period of solitude. Less than a month had passed when another visitor appeared upon the Silver Peak, this one with no higher purpose than a desire to look upon the hermit. He also, however, brought with him a gift, and remainedand ate with Oman, who conversed with him without much constraint, out of a kind of eager desire to convince himself that the life of men was really as troublous as of old. This fellow departed, carrying with him a glowing report of the tractability of the holy man, and the great wisdom he had gained from conversing with him. And this tale destroyed Oman’s peace; for it brought upon him a perfect deluge of visitors, of every degree, male and female, whom, in the beginning, he helplessly received, and gave of his store of wisdom, replying to their innumerable questions with the patience of a child. Among these pilgrims to his shrine were Poussa and her guardian, who, when they learned that he still dwelt so close above them, lost no time in seeking him. And Poussa, indeed, Oman greeted with real pleasure; providing her with the choicest of his fare, of which he by now had some variety; for many of his visitors brought gifts of food, which, his stock of grain running low under the demand, he perforce accepted. Moreover, he was now clad in a new robe, finer of texture and richer as to border than any he had ever worn. From Poussa, however, he would accept nothing, reminding her that she had long since made him her debtor for what he could never repay. And the girl and her guardian left the mountain top after promising to repeat their visit.
For some weeks, buoyed up by the thought of genuine friendship, Oman continued to let himself be seen, treated his visitors with courtesy, and occasionallyaccepted some of their gifts. But after another month of it, he grew sick of the servility of his visitors and the transparent curiosity with which they regarded him; and, taking with him only a pouch full of grain from his small store, he disappeared into the forest of the east slope, and remained there for a fortnight, till hunger drove him home again. It was sunset of an October day when he reappeared upon the height, and, arriving at his cave, found it already tenanted. Across the threshold, motionless, unconscious, lay the body of an old man, shrunken and pitiably emaciated, clad in a tattered robe, a much-used staff lying at his side.
Oman’s anger at sight of the intruder quickly melted to pity. Kneeling beside the prostrate body, he lifted one of the limp hands and began to chafe it back to warmth. This being of no avail, he hurried to the spring, returning with a wooden vessel full of water, which he sprinkled upon the worn face and poured down the parched throat. It had its effect. The stranger stirred uneasily, muttered a few words, and suddenly opened his eyes. Oman, with a momentary throb of memory, perceived that one of these eyes was brown, and the other a faded blue.