The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!
Dirge of the Langurs.
There was once a man in India who was Prime Minister of one of the
semi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country.
He was a Brahmin, so high-caste that caste ceased to have any particular
meaning for him; and his father had been an important official in the
gay-coloured tag-rag and bobtail of an old-fashioned Hindu Court. But
as Purun Dass grew up he felt that the old order of things was changing,
and that if any one wished to get on in the world he must stand well
with the English, and imitate all that the English believed to be good.
At the same time a native official must keep his own master’s favour.
This was a difficult game, but the quiet, close-mouthed young Brahmin,
helped by a good English education at a Bombay University, played it
coolly, and rose, step by step, to be Prime Minister of the kingdom.
That is to say, he held more real power than his master the Maharajah.
When the old king--who was suspicious of the English, their railways and
telegraphs--died, Purun Dass stood high with his young successor, who
had been tutored by an Englishman; and between them, though he always
took care that his master should have the credit, they established
schools for little girls, made roads, and started State dispensaries and
shows of agricultural implements, and published a yearly blue-book on
the “Moral and Material Progress of the State,” and the Foreign Office
and the Government of India were delighted. Very few native States take
up English progress altogether, for they will not believe, as Purun Dass
showed he did, that what was good for the Englishman must be twice as
good for the Asiatic. The Prime Minister became the honoured friend
of Viceroys, and Governors, and Lieutenant-Governors, and medical
missionaries, and common missionaries, and hard-riding English officers
who came to shoot in the State preserves, as well as of whole hosts of
tourists who travelled up and down India in the cold weather, showing
how things ought to be managed. In his spare time he would endow
scholarships for the study of medicine and manufactures on strictly
English lines, and write letters to the “Pioneer”, the greatest Indian
daily paper, explaining his master’s aims and objects.
At last he went to England on a visit, and had to pay enormous sums to
the priests when he came back; for even so high-caste a Brahmin as Purun
Dass lost caste by crossing the black sea. In London he met and talked
with every one worth knowing--men whose names go all over the world--and
saw a great deal more than he said. He was given honorary degrees by
learned universities, and he made speeches and talked of Hindu social
reform to English ladies in evening dress, till all London cried, “This
is the most fascinating man we have ever met at dinner since cloths were
first laid.”
When he returned to India there was a blaze of glory, for the Viceroy
himself made a special visit to confer upon the Maharajah the Grand
Cross of the Star of India--all diamonds and ribbons and enamel; and at
the same ceremony, while the cannon boomed, Purun Dass was made a Knight
Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire; so that his name stood Sir
Purun Dass, K.C.I.E.
That evening, at dinner in the big Viceregal tent, he stood up with the
badge and the collar of the Order on his breast, and replying to the
toast of his master’s health, made a speech few Englishmen could have
bettered.
Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did
a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the
world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went
back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to
the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the
subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the
people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can
do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun
Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up
the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man,
was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law
recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,--though he
had never carried a weapon in his life,--and twenty years head of a
household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to
be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and
cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him.
Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer
needs.
Behind him, as he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and
brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished
brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the
ground--behind him they were firing salutes from the bastions in honour
of his happy successor. Purun Dass nodded. 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 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 for
fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses,
with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the
tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of
the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth
stone circles of the threshing-floors. Looking across the valley, the
eye was deceived by the size of things, and could not at first realise
that what seemed to be low scrub, on the opposite mountain-flank, was
in truth a forest of hundred-foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop
across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it
was half-way over. A few bands of scattered clouds strung up and down
the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills, or rising up and dying
out when they were level with the head of the pass. And “Here shall I
find peace,” said Purun Bhagat.
Now, a Hill-man makes nothing of a few hundred feet up or down, and as
soon as the villagers saw the smoke in the deserted shrine, the village
priest climbed up the terraced hillside to welcome the stranger.
When he met Purun Bhagat’s eyes--the eyes of a man used to control
thousands--he bowed to the earth, took the begging-bowl without a word,
and returned to the village, saying, “We have at last a holy man.
Never have I seen such a man. He is of the Plains--but pale-coloured--a
Brahmin of the Brahmins.” Then all the housewives of the village said,
“Think you he will stay with us?” and each did her best to cook the
most savoury meal for the Bhagat. Hill-food is very simple, but with
buckwheat and Indian corn, and rice and red pepper, and little fish out
of the stream in the valley, and honey from the flue-like hives built in
the stone walls, and dried apricots, and turmeric, and wild ginger, and
bannocks of flour, a devout woman can make good things, and it was a
full bowl that the priest carried to the Bhagat. Was he going to stay?
asked the priest. Would he need a chela--a disciple--to beg for him? 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 cannot 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 begging-bowl, 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. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and
beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in graceful
curves. They liked the warmth of the fire, too, and huddled round it
till Purun Bhagat had to push them aside to throw on more fuel; and
in the morning, as often as not, he would find a furry ape sharing his
blanket. All day long, one or other of the tribe would sit by his side,
staring out at the snows, crooning and looking unspeakably wise and
sorrowful.
After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like our
red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of his horns
against the cold stones of Kali’s statue, and stamped his feet when he
saw the man at the shrine. But Purun Bhagat never moved, and, little by
little, the royal stag edged up and nuzzled his shoulder. Purun Bhagat
slid one cool hand along the hot antlers, and the touch soothed the
fretted beast, who bowed his head, and Purun Bhagat very softly rubbed
and ravelled off the velvet. Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe
and fawn--gentle things that mumbled on the holy man’s blanket--or would
come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take his
share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest and almost
the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big rabbity ears erect;
even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must needs find out what the
light in the shrine meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun
Bhagat’s lap, coming and going with the shadows of the fire. Purun
Bhagat called them all “my brothers,” and his low call of “Bhai! Bhai!”
would draw them from the forest at noon if they were within ear shot.
The Himalayan black bear, moody and suspicious--Sona, who has the
V-shaped white mark under his chin--passed that way more than once; and
since the Bhagat showed no fear, Sona showed no anger, but watched him,
and came closer, and begged a share of the caresses, and a dole of bread
or wild berries. Often, in the still dawns, when the Bhagat would climb
to the very crest of the pass to watch the red day walking along the
peaks of the snows, he would find Sona shuffling and grunting at his
heels, thrusting, a curious fore-paw under fallen trunks, and bringing
it away with a WHOOF of impatience; or his early steps would wake Sona
where he lay curled up, and the great brute, rising erect, would think
to fight, till he heard the Bhagat’s voice and knew his best friend.
Nearly all hermits and holy men who live apart from the big cities have
the reputation of being able to work miracles with the wild things, but
all the miracle lies in keeping still, in never making a hasty movement,
and, for a long time, at least, in never looking directly at a visitor.
The villagers saw the outline of the barasingh stalking like a shadow
through the dark forest behind the shrine; saw the minaul, the Himalayan
pheasant, blazing in her best colours before Kali’s statue; and the
langurs on their haunches, inside, playing with the walnut shells. Some
of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion,
behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker
stood firm.
Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that
all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much he knows
something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing
great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to
think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his
soul had come.
So thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone
slab at the side of the antelope skin was dented into a little hole
by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the
tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore
into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast
knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colours with
the seasons; the threshing-floors filled and emptied, and filled again
and again; and again and again, when winter came, the langurs frisked
among the branches feathered with light snow, till the mother-monkeys
brought their sad-eyed little babies up from the warmer valleys with the
spring. There were few changes in the village. The priest was older, and
many of the little children who used to come with the begging-dish sent
their own children now; and when you asked of the villagers how long
their holy man had lived in Kali’s Shrine at the head of the pass, they
answered, “Always.”
Then came such summer rains as had not been known in the Hills for many
seasons. Through three good months the valley was wrapped in cloud
and soaking mist--steady, unrelenting downfall, breaking off into
thunder-shower after thunder-shower. Kali’s Shrine stood above the
clouds, for the most part, and there was a whole month in which the
Bhagat never caught a glimpse of his village. It was packed away under
a white floor of cloud that swayed and shifted and rolled on itself and
bulged upward, but never broke from its piers--the streaming flanks of
the valley.
All that time he heard nothing but the sound of a million little waters,
overhead from the trees, and underfoot along the ground, soaking through
the pine-needles, dripping from the tongues of draggled fern, and
spouting in newly-torn muddy channels down the slopes. Then the sun
came out, and drew forth the good incense of the deodars and the
rhododendrons, and that far-off, clean smell which the Hill people call
“the smell of the snows.” The hot sunshine lasted for a week, and then
the rains gathered together for their last downpour, and the water fell
in sheets that flayed off the skin of the ground and leaped back in
mud. Purun Bhagat heaped his fire high that night, for he was sure his
brothers would need warmth; but never a beast came to the shrine, though
he called and called till he dropped asleep, wondering what had happened
in the woods.
It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a
thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket, and,
stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur. “It is better here
than in the trees,” he said sleepily, loosening a fold of blanket; “take
it and be warm.” The monkey caught his hand and pulled hard. “Is it
food, then?” said Purun Bhagat. “Wait awhile, and I will prepare some.”
As he kneeled to throw fuel on the fire the langur ran to the door of
the shrine, crooned and ran back again, plucking at the man’s knee.
“What is it? What is thy trouble, Brother?” said Purun Bhagat, for the
langur’s eyes were full of things that he could not tell. “Unless one of
thy caste be in a trap--and none set traps here--I will not go into that
weather. Look, Brother, even the barasingh comes for shelter!”
The deer’s antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed against
the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun Bhagat’s direction
and stamped uneasily, hissing through his half-shut nostrils.
“Hai! Hai! Hai!” said the Bhagat, snapping his fingers, “Is THIS payment
for a night’s lodging?” But the deer pushed him toward the door, and as
he did so Purun Bhagat heard the sound of something opening with a sigh,
and saw two slabs of the floor draw away from each other, while the
sticky earth below smacked its lips.
“Now I see,” said Purun Bhagat. “No blame to my brothers that they did
not sit by the fire to-night. The mountain is falling. And yet--why
should I go?” His eye fell on the empty begging-bowl, and his face
changed. “They have given me good food daily since--since I came, and,
if I am not swift, to-morrow there will not be one mouth in the valley.
Indeed, I must go and warn them below. Back there, Brother! Let me get
to the fire.”
The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine torch deep
into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit. “Ah! ye came to warn
me,” he said, rising. “Better than that we shall do; better than that.
Out, now, and lend me thy neck, Brother, for I have but two feet.”
He clutched the bristling withers of the barasingh with his right hand,
held the torch away with his left, and stepped out of the shrine into
the desperate night. There was no breath of wind, but the rain nearly
drowned the flare as the great deer hurried down the slope, sliding
on his haunches. As soon as they were clear of the forest more of the
Bhagat’s brothers joined them. He heard, though he could not see, the
langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The
rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath
his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he
stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh. He was no longer
a holy man, but Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., Prime Minister of no small
State, a man accustomed to command, going out to save life. Down
the steep, plashy path they poured all together, the Bhagat and his
brothers, down and down till the deer’s feet clicked and stumbled on the
wall of a threshing-floor, and he snorted because he smelt Man. Now they
were at the head of the one crooked village street, and the Bhagat beat
with his crutch on the barred windows of the blacksmith’s house, as his
torch blazed up in the shelter of the eaves. “Up and out!” cried Purun
Bhagat; and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had
spoken aloud to a man. “The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out,
oh, you within!”
“It is our Bhagat,” said the blacksmith’s wife. “He stands among his
beasts. Gather the little ones and give the call.”
It ran from house to house, while the beasts, cramped in the narrow way,
surged and huddled round the Bhagat, and Sona puffed impatiently.
The people hurried into the street--they were no more than seventy souls
all told--and in the glare of the torches they saw their Bhagat holding
back the terrified barasingh, while the monkeys plucked piteously at his
skirts, and Sona sat on his haunches and roared.
“Across the valley and up the next hill!” shouted Purun Bhagat. “Leave
none behind! We follow!”
Then the people ran as only Hill folk can run, for they knew that in a
landslip you must climb for the highest ground across the valley. They
fled, splashing through the little river at the bottom, and panted up
the terraced fields on the far side, while the Bhagat and his brethren
followed. Up and up the opposite mountain they climbed, calling to each
other by name--the roll-call of the village--and at their heels toiled
the big barasingh, weighted by the failing strength of Purun Bhagat.
At last the deer stopped in the shadow of a deep pinewood, five hundred
feet up the hillside. His instinct, that had warned him of the coming
slide, told him he would he safe here.
Purun Bhagat dropped fainting by his side, for the chill of the rain and
that fierce climb were killing him; but first he called to the scattered
torches ahead, “Stay and count your numbers”; then, whispering to the
deer as he saw the lights gather in a cluster: “Stay with me, Brother.
Stay--till--I--go!”
There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that
grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the
hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and
rocked to the blow. Then a note as steady, deep, and true as the deep C
of the organ drowned everything for perhaps five minutes, while the very
roots of the pines quivered to it. It died away, and the sound of the
rain falling on miles of hard ground and grass changed to the muffled
drum of water on soft earth. That told its own tale.
Never a villager--not even the priest--was bold enough to speak to the
Bhagat who had saved their lives. They crouched under the pines and
waited till the day. When it came they looked across the valley and
saw that what had been forest, and terraced field, and track-threaded
grazing-ground was one raw, red, fan-shaped smear, with a few trees
flung head-down on the scarp. That red ran high up the hill of their
refuge, damming back the little river, which had begun to spread into a
brick-coloured lake. Of the village, of the road to the shrine, of the
shrine itself, and the forest behind, there was no trace. For one mile
in width and two thousand feet in sheer depth the mountain-side had come
away bodily, planed clean from head to heel.
And the villagers, one by one, crept through the wood to pray before
their Bhagat. They saw the barasingh standing over him, who fled when
they came near, and they heard the langurs wailing in the branches,
and Sona moaning up the hill; but their Bhagat was dead, sitting
cross-legged, his back against a tree, his crutch under his armpit, and
his face turned to the north-east.
The priest said: “Behold a miracle after a miracle, for in this very
attitude must all Sunnyasis be buried! Therefore where he now is we will
build the temple to our holy man.”
They built the temple before a year was ended--a little stone-and-earth
shrine--and they called the hill the Bhagat’s hill, and they worship
there with lights and flowers and offerings to this day. But they do
not know that the saint of their worship is the late Sir Purun Dass,
K.C.I.E., D.C.L., Ph.D., etc., once Prime Minister of the progressive
and enlightened State of Mohiniwala, and honorary or corresponding
member of more learned and scientific societies than will ever do any
good in this world or the next.