There was a certain trail that rose from Preshbend, and ended after an hour’s walk in a high cliff of easy ascent.  Bedient often went there alone when the moon was full—­and waited for her rising.  At last through a rift in the far mountains, a faint ghost would appear, and waveringly whiten the glacial breast of old God-Mother—­the highest peak in the vision of Preshbend.  Just a nucleus of light at first, like a shimmering mist, but it steadied and brightened—­until that snowy summit was configured in the midst of her lowlier brethren on the borders of Kashmir—­and Bedient, turning from his deep reflections, would find the source of the miracle, trailing her glory up from the South.

Often he lost the sense of personality in these meditations.  His eyes turned at first upon that dead, dark mountain, which presently caught the reflection of the moon (in itself a miracle of loveliness); then the moon which held the reflection of the hidden sun, which in its turn reflected the power of All; and he, a bit of suppressed animation among the rocks of the cliff, audaciously comprehending that chain of reflections and adding his own!  The marvel of it all carried him a dimension beyond the responsiveness of mere brain-tissue, and for hours in which he was not Bedient, but one with some Unity that swept over the pageant of the universe, his body lay hunched and chill in the cold of the heights....  That was his first departure, and he was in his twenty-eighth year.

Another time, as he watched old God-Mother, he suddenly felt himself an instrument upon which played the awful yearning of the younger peoples of Europe and America.  Greatly startled, he saw them hungering for this vastness, this beauty and peace; yet enchanted among little things, condemned to chattering and pecking at each other, and through interminable centuries to tread dim hot ways of spite and weariness, cruelty and nervous pain.  He, Bedient, had found peace here, but it was not for him to take always.  He seemed held by that awful yearning across the world; as if he were an envoy commissioned to find Content—­to bring back the secret that would break their enchantment....  No, he was not yet detached from his people; he could only accept tentatively these mighty virtues of wonder and silence, gird his loins with them and finally take back the rich tidings....  Was he dwelling in silence to walk in power over there?  This excited and puzzled him at first.  Bedient as a bearer of light was new....

Yet hunger was growing within for his own people; a passion to tell them; rather to make them see that all their aims and possessions were not worth one moment, such as he had spent, watching the breast of old God-Mother whiten, with the consciousness of God walking in the mountain-winds, the scent of camphor, lotos, sandal and wild-honey in His garments.  A passion, indeed, grew within him to make his people see that real life has no concern with wrestlings in fetid valleys, but up, up the rising roads—­poised with faith, and laughing with power—­until through a rift in the mountains, they are struck by the light of God’s face, and shine back—­like the peaks of Kashmir to the moon.