And presently when they departed for the frontier, he followed secretly after them, with two Buddhist friends.
So they came to the frontier, where the line of the fortifications stretched away lessening into the desert, with their watch-towers fantastically capped, like Mandarins. But here only the caravan could pass; for the guards had orders from the Son of Heaven to seize upon Hiouen-thsang;—and the Indian merchants rode away far beyond the line of the watch-towers; and the caravan became only a moving speck against the disk of the sun, to disappear with his setting. Yet in the night Hiouen-thsang passed with his friends, like shadows, through the line of guards, and followed the trail.
Happily the captain in charge of the next watch-tower was a holy man, and moved by the supplications of the Buddhist priests, he permitted Hiouen-thsang to pass on. But the other brethren trembled and returned, leaving Hiouen-thsang alone. Yet India was still more than a thousand miles distant, by the way of the caravans.
Only the men of the last watch-tower would not allow Hiouen-thsang to pass; but he escaped by them into the desert. Then he followed the line of the caravan, the prints of the feet of camels and horses leading toward India. Skeletons were whitening in the sands; the eyeless sockets of innumerable skulls looked at him. The sun set and rose again many times; the sand-sea moved its waves continually with a rustling sound; the multitude of white bones waxed vaster. And as Hiouen-thsang proceeded phantom cities mocked him on the right hand and upon the left, and the spectral caravans wrought by the mirage rode by him shadowlessly. Then his water-skin burst, and the desert drank up its contents; the hoof-prints disappeared. Hiouen-thsang had lost his way....
From the past of twelve hundred years ago, we can hear the breaking of that water-skin;—we can feel the voiceless despair that for a moment chilled the heart and faith of Hiouen-thsang—alone in the desert of skeletons—alone in the infinite platitude of sand broken only by the mockeries of the mirage. But the might of faith helped him on; prayers were his food, Buddha the star-compass that illuminated the path to India. For five days and five nights he traveled without meat or drink under blistering suns, under the vast throbbing of stars—and at last the sharp yellow line of the horizon became green!
It was not the mirage—it was a land of steel-bright lakes and long grass—the land of the men who live upon horseback—the country of the Oigour Tartars.
The Khan received the pilgrim as a son; honors were showered upon him—for the fame of Hiouen-thsang as a teacher of the Law had reached into the heart of Asia. And they desired that he should remain with them, to instruct them in the knowledge of Buddha. When he would not—only after having vainly essayed upon him such temptation and coercion by turns that he was driven to despair, the Khan at last permitted him to depart under oath that he would return. But India was still far away. Hiouen-thsang had to pass through the territories of twenty-four great kings ere reaching the Himalayas. The Khan gave him an escort and letters to the rulers of all kingdoms, for his memory is yet blessed in the Empire Celestial.
It was in the seventh century. Rivers have changed their courses since then. Hiouen-thsang visited the rulers of kingdoms that have utterly disappeared; he beheld civilizations where are now wastes of sand; he conversed with masters of a learning that has vanished without leaving a trace behind. The face of the world is changed; but the words of Hiouen-thsang change not;—lakes have dried up, yet we even now in this Western republic drink betimes from that Fountain of Gold which Hiouen-thsang set flowing—to flow forever!
So they beheld at last, afar off, the awful Himalayas, whose white turbans touch the heaven of India, vested with thunder-clouds, belted with lightnings! And Hiouen-thsang passed through gorges overhung by the drooping fangs of monsters of ice—through ravines so dark that the traveler beholds the stars above him at noonday, and eagles like dots against the sky—and hard by the icy cavern whence the sacred river leaps in roaring birth—and by winding ways to valleys eternally green—and ever thus into the glowing paradise of Hindustan. But of those that followed Hiouen-thsang, thirteen were buried in the eternal snow.
He saw the wondrous cities of India; he saw the sanctuaries of Benares; saw the great temples since destroyed for modern eyes by Moslem conquerors; saw the idols that had diamond eyes and bellies filled with food of emeralds and carbuncles; he trod where Buddha had walked; he came to Maghada, which is the Holy Land of India. Alone and on foot he traversed the jungles; the cobra hissed under his feet, the tiger glared at him with eyes that flamed like emeralds, the wild elephant's mountain-shadow fell across his path. Yet he feared nothing, for he sought Buddha. The Phansigars flung about his neck the noose of the strangler, and yet loosened him on beholding the holiness of his face; swarthy robbers, whose mustaches were curved like scimitars, lifted their blades to smite, and beholding his eyes turned away. So he came to the Dragon-Cavern of Purushapura to seek Buddha. For Buddha, though having entered Nirvana a thousand years, sometimes there made himself visible as a luminous Shadow to those who loved him.