The dawn was coming! Under his horse's flying hoofs the interminable sequence of sandy by-paths through the sun-baked fallows chequered with fields of young millet and maize, seemed to slip past. As the light grew, the purple eyes of the feathery vetches seemed to look at him tear-drenched with dew, the goldy-green balls of the colocynth apples as they cracked under the thundering feet gave out a bitter, bracing, wholesome smell.
Down in an old backwater of the river which held a few acres of damper ground, a flight of cranes rose, to wing a wedge-shaped way to the west.
"Oh! for the wings of a dove."
That was what Pâdré Rudolfo sang.
Was that a spiral trail of smoke on the horizon? Aye; but from a village rubbish heap. After all, a funeral pyre was nothing more; a mere rubbish heap of accessories in which a soul had played its part.
Yea! but as when one layeth
His worn out robes away
And, taking new ones sayeth
These will I wear to-day.
So putteth by the spirit
Lightly its robe of flesh
And passeth to inherit
A residence afresh.
The words of the Bhagavad-Gita recurred to his mind, bringing with them as they do to every human mind that knows them, a sudden sense of companionship, of hand clasping in the wilderness of life.
The pale primrose of the dawn was reddening fast. A few more minutes and the sun's edge would for half a second sparkle like a star on the rim of the world; and then, with the coming of sunlight, the King's Shadow, swifter than the King himself would speed ahead, lengthening out, reaching, touching all things before he, the flesh and blood, could touch them!
Ah! The Shadow was the real man! He glanced backward. He had come fast. No one was in sight. Following the whimsey of his thought he told himself it was always so. Behind, out of sight, almost out of mind, rode the world, in front the Shadow--the Will, the Ideal, the Unattainable.
Faint and far on the horizon a square speck of light showed the tower of Shakîngarh, the Falcon's Nest. There was little time to spare then, for the sun shone on its battlements.