Tom followed them, taking one more ride round the town before he went. The last place he visited—this he remembered long afterwards—was Hoomayun's tomb. He entered within battlemented walls, mounted the massive platform on which the palace of the dead stands, and saw the marble tombs of the Emperor and his friends, lying each in the frost-bound silence of its vaulted hall. Then, from the elevated platform he looked out on the soft green fields that surround the city, and the river flowing peacefully on its way, while the towering minarets of the glorious Jumma Musjid, and the swelling cupolas of the Pearl Mosque, and the red battlemented walls of Shah Jehan's palace loomed mysteriously through the amber-coloured mist of the morning.
Silent and peaceful it lay, like a dream of past greatness; the city, incalculable ages ago, of proud Hindu warriors and earth-spurning priests; the capital, in later years, and the stronghold of Moslem dominion; the city swept by wave after wave of revolution, sacked, devastated, shifted hither and thither over the plain; but never destroyed; to-day the city of a shadow; to-morrow, what? As he gazed into the tranquil plain, he felt his soul shuddering within him. Grey antiquity seemed to be throwing its arms about him and pressing out his life. He panted for breath like one stifled. What was he, and his people, with all their greatness, what—what were they? Time, that, like the fabled monster devouring its own children, moves forward irresistibly, had brought them into being, and Time, when their days ran out, would thrust them from the path of the living. Or was Time also an illusion—a shadow thrown by shadows on the whiteness of eternity? Did nothing really exist? Nothing—the awful word echoed through his brain, like the knell of a dying faith. He groaned and pressed his hands together.
Hark! What was that?
'Is anyone there?' he said, looking round him.
He saw no one; but a voice answered, 'I am here.'
'Who are you?' said Tom.
'The same who spoke to you before. I came to you with your inheritance. You ask if there is a reality. I tell you that there is.'
'Then, in the name of Heaven, where is it to be found?'
'Listen!' said the voice. 'You are like many others who search afar off for the thing that is close at hand. Look within; not without. It is there that you will find reality, for you carry it about with you. You, not your body, but the self that animates the body, are the reality of which you are in search. Know this and you are free, but you cannot yet.'
'Why cannot I?'