As Govinda thought like this, and there was a conflict in his heart, he once again bowed to Siddhartha, drawn by love.  Deeply he bowed to him who was calmly sitting.

“Siddhartha,” he spoke, “we have become old men.  It is unlikely for one of us to see the other again in this incarnation.  I see, beloved, that you have found peace.  I confess that I haven’t found it.  Tell me, oh honourable one, one more word, give me something on my way which I can grasp, which I can understand!  Give me something to be with me on my path.  It it often hard, my path, often dark, Siddhartha.”

Siddhartha said nothing and looked at him with the ever unchanged, quiet smile.  Govinda stared at his face, with fear, with yearning, suffering, and the eternal search was visible in his look, eternal not-finding.

Siddhartha saw it and smiled.

“Bent down to me!” he whispered quietly in Govinda’s ear.  “Bend down to me!  Like this, even closer!  Very close!  Kiss my forehead, Govinda!”

But while Govinda with astonishment, and yet drawn by great love and expectation, obeyed his words, bent down closely to him and touched his forehead with his lips, something miraculous happened to him.  While his thoughts were still dwelling on Siddhartha’s wondrous words, while he was still struggling in vain and with reluctance to think away time, to imagine Nirvana and Sansara as one, while even a certain contempt for the words of his friend was fighting in him against an immense love and veneration, this happened to him: 

He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which all constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha.  He saw the face of a fish, a carp, with an infinitely painfully opened mouth, the face of a dying fish, with fading eyes—­he saw the face of a new-born child, red and full of wrinkles, distorted from crying—­he saw the face of a murderer, he saw him plunging a knife into the body of another person—­he saw, in the same second, this criminal in bondage, kneeling and his head being chopped off by the executioner with one blow of his sword—­he saw the bodies of men and women, naked in positions and cramps of frenzied love—­he saw corpses stretched out, motionless, cold, void—­ he saw the heads of animals, of boars, of crocodiles, of elephants, of bulls, of birds—­he saw gods, saw Krishna, saw Agni—­he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between