As she drove off, however, her head was in a whirl; and as, when pausing to pick up Dr. Campbell, the whole panorama of the camp, the hills behind it, the distant temples of Eshwara, the busy place-seekers in the foreground, the scarlet-sin-stains of the chuprassies' coats against the dazzling whiteness of the tents, lay before her, one of those rare, incomprehensible moods came upon her when the soul retreats into its spiritual body, so that the sight grows clear, the touch keen, and you can feel the round world spin beneath your feet, see the shadow of earth stretching far among the stars.
The World's Desire! What was it?
Brought up to believe that the heart of man--that mainspring of the spinning world--was vile, she had never asked herself why this was so. She had read the story of Adam and Eve with unquestioning faith, yet never sought to know what had changed the good to evil.
But now, as her eyes rested on those far-distant peaks with that faint mist about their feet hiding the "Cradle of the Gods," and followed, as far as the eye could follow in the nearer hills, the climbing track worn by the weariness of that eternal search after righteousness, she asked herself what it was which kept mankind so long upon the road; asked herself, for the first time, what that first sin had been which had lost Paradise.
No lack of desire after salvation, surely. Generation on generation of Eastern pilgrims had worn that path out of the sheer rock, had agonized after good, and remained evil. A little shudder of memory ran through her at the thought--how evil! And now the West, with its white tents, its white face, its white creed, had come to show a newer, a better way.
Had it? But what had it done for itself? She had worked for two years in London ere coming out to India; and another shudder of memory swept over her of what she had seen there.
The World's Desire! Lance Carlyon had called her that--a woman with a red-gold apple in her hand.
The sound of angry dispute brought her back to realities. They were passing out of the camp under the triumphal arch, and one of its sentries was barring the entrance of an ash-smeared figure which was brandishing a stamped petition paper, as if it had been a card of admission, and yelling excitedly for "Justice! justice!"
"It is that pernicious fellow, Gorakh-nâth," remarked Dr. Campbell, sententiously. "He wishes, no doubt, to appeal against Captain Dering's order, of which I, for one, am heartily glad. A Christian government is bound to refuse sanction to the practice of a faith which, it is impossible not to see, is degrading in the extreme to those who hold it."
Erda's eyes were still clear; clear with what those who do not see, call dreams.