The roar was articulate now, and those behind looked doubtfully at each other.
"If it should be the miracle?" suggested one conspirator; but another shook his head, "How can that be? None know the trick save those two, Gu-gu and Am-ma, and they are safe."
"Unless it be a miracle," put in a third, almost timidly. "God's club makes no noise, and the night has been full of marvels."
So an uneasy silence fell upon the rest.
"Hârâ! Hârî! Hârî! Hârâ!"
There was no mistaking the cry now. It rose exultant, yet with that wailing note in it still, which lingers always in humanity's claim to have found its lost Paradise, its lost purity.
Yet there was no trace of doubt in the almost frantic joy on every face in the dense multitude which stopped the little cavalcade, as it entered the square around the Pool of Immortality; stopped it hopelessly, as if the moving, breathing, living mass had been a dead wall.
"Hârâ! Hârî! Hârî! Hârâ!"
It was almost a yell. The patience was gone utterly, and far as the eye could reach, in all the wide square, in every street and alley converging to it, there was the restless ineffectual movement of the sea, when, on a summer's day, it beats itself calmly yet persistently--rising and falling--upon a sheer cliff, against the impossible. There was no one to check the crowd now, to prevent it from finding Death and Immortality at the same time. What matter? What were a few hundreds of crushed bodies, when the soul found what it sought?
The riders behind Roshan threw up their hands at the sight. No hope here for the littlenesses of life; for principalities and powers, even for political liberty.