The flame-gatherers

by Margaret Horton Potter

Up to this height from the depths below came Oman, mounting slowly, all but overcome with the long toil of nearly twenty hours. From the torrent, through cloud fringes, out of forest darkness came he, upborne by his strange will. Reaching at last the level, he walked on it till he emerged from the trees into an open space, on one side of which rose the rocky wall of the peak, pierced with its little caves. Far to the east, down the long, slow slope, twenty-five hundred feet below, the lake lay glittering with golden ripples. Beyond it hills rolled, on and on, till, in the far morning-land, they ended in a deep, violet mist.

Here, in the open, Oman paused and looked. As he stood, gaunt and tall, clad in the floating, tattered raiment of some long-dead Bhikkhu, in his right hand a stout staff, in his left a small bag of millet—Poussa’s gift, the two spirits in him looking out through his great eyes, there was no suggestion of triumph about him. He was overcome by the wonderful beauty of the surrounding scene; but he also betrayed a terrible fatigue, the fatigue of mind, as well as of body. The mountain lazily surveyed him as he stood, and perceived that he carried the key to the gate of solitude. He was not to be denied admittance. Deserted of mankind he had come unto Nature, asking shelter from the world; and Nature, pitying, could not refuse.

Still actuated by the spirit that seemed distinct from himself, Oman moved slowly toward the rocky ridge, and entered one of the caves that pierced it. Here was a place that would shelter him from storms; and here, should nights prove cold, a fire would always live. In the cave’s mouth he sat, for a long time, musing on the possibilities of making an abode in this strange place. There seemed to be only one vital lack. There was no sign of water anywhere about. Should that not exist, he must descend again. This thought caused his heart fairly to sink. Obeying a quick impulse, he set out in search of water; and it was nearly an hour before, fifty feet down the eastern slope, he found a spring that sent a tiny, falling thread down in the direction of the lake, till it was lost under the earth, a long way below.

The last obstacle was gone now. This place was fitted to be his abode. Here, far from the reach of his kind, he would dwell, till he had fashioned for himself a life that should be impervious to the shafts of wanton injustice and cruelty. Here he must fight the great battle of his dual nature, the outcome of which he himself could not foresee.

This much settled, he turned to practical needs. After a long draught of water, he went back to his cave, and began the tedious process of building a fire after the fashion of the woodsman:—twirling a small, pointed stick, like a drill, into a close-fitting hole made in a piece of harder wood; feeding the heat with fine dust particles and crumbled dead leaves, till at last a flame appeared. It was a matter of an hour or more before his fire was ready; and by this time Oman was famished with hunger. He parched some of his millet on a flat stone, ate it with eagerness, and finished the meal with some mangoes gathered on the mountain side. Then, his faintness relieved, though his hunger was not wholly satisfied, he lay down and slept, waking again just as the sun was setting.

The wonder of the following hour made an impression on him that was indelible: that bound him about with a spell which lasted as long as he dwelt upon the mountain top. Far away in the great west, from the palpitating flame in which the sun had set, spread a vast cloud of deepening crimson that slowly broadened, through the air and over the hills, clothing peak after peak with rose-gold, its misty glow shimmering over the whole earth, till every crag, every tree-top, every eagle’s wing, was transcended with the light. Gradually the color shifted, changed, sunk to a paler pink, encompassed with gray and violet shadows that shrouded the form of Night, who presently set on high her beacon: the diamond-pointed evening star, hanging, tremulous, in the deep-tinted west. And lo! as the swift Indian twilight died, the sister stars one by one flashed into view, till the sky was crowned with them, and the day lay dead under a velvet pall.

Slowly Oman turned and walked back into his cave, his sense of exaltation changing into oppression: a realization of his infinite littleness before the immensity of the changeless world. Night after night such a scene as he had just witnessed was unfolded here, where no mortal eye was supposed to look on it. He felt himself an intruder in a holy shrine. His presence was the sacrilege of an inviolate fane, the retreating-place of God. And the loneliness, the oppression of his senses, was like the weight of the whole mountain on his soul. Still, through it all, was a joy: the joy of the knowledge of those things that no man knoweth, the splendor that man cannot parallel.

All that night Oman scarcely slept; and yet the hours were not long. His mind wandered unrestrained through space. His thoughts were of a great and solemn beauty, of which he was scarcely conscious. In the first glimmer of dawn he left his rocky bed, and went out again into the open, this time turning his face to the east. And there was enacted before him another indescribable drama, which lasted till the sun was high in the heavens. Then he returned to eat another meagre meal of parched grain, supplemented with water. That bare sustenance seemed the only permissible food in the face of the ascetic splendors of sky and mountain-top. All through the day he moved quietly about the plateau, feeling more and more that it would be impossible now for him to leave the enchanted place. And the mountain, still watching how he moved and communed, humbly, within himself, sanctioned his presence, and bade him welcome to her undisciplined heights.

Such was the beginning of his sojourn on the Silver Peak, which lasted not weeks nor months, but years—how many years, Oman never knew. The tale of this life might be compassed in a line, if one dealt only with events; but the mental phases through which he passed are scarcely to be transcribed. Life was sustained in him by the meagrest food. He lived as the Chelahs live: upon his soul; and was satisfied therewith. In the beginning, he was forced to return some dozen times to the hamlet in the valley, where he wove on Poussa’s loom, to earn grain enough to live on. But, early in his hermit’s life, he ploughed himself a field on the plateau, planted millet-seed therein, and, after that, reaped two scanty crops a year:—enough to live on. And from the period of his first harvest, he descended no more into the valley, where Poussa mourned for him as dead.

To one choosing, or chosen for, the life Oman had elected, dwelling in utter solitude from year to year, two courses are open. If the physical in him predominates, he draws out of the nature around him all that is animal, savage, or untamed, gradually loses his powers of thought and articulation, finally, the very habits of man, becoming a creature wilder than the wild things themselves. But, if he be of the spiritual type, a dreamer or religious fanatic, he draws toward him the soul of Nature; his mind expands as his body dwindles; and it is said that strange psychical powers come to him. With Oman, in the beginning, it seemed doubtful which he was to become: beast or angel. Buddhism had not uprooted the passion and the animal instincts of his dual spirit; but it had at least opened his eyes to the spiritual life. For many months—two, or perhaps three years, even—the battle of the two forces raged within him. And probably it was the mere fact that he was able for so long a time to retain spiritual remembrance, that gave him victory in the end. At first his moods alternated. For days at a time he would sit wrapped in a state of impenetrable calm, meditating as Gautama had meditated. Then, without any warning, the brute in him would rise, and, driven by it, he would range through the mountain woods like a demon, climbing, goat-like, over crags and precipices, and performing feats of physical strength that were almost superhuman. Again, suddenly, in one breath, he would break into a tempest of tears and cries, and, flinging himself on the ground, wherever he happened to be, would lie there, shaken with sobs, till sheer exhaustion brought quiet. Reaction never failed him, however; and it was always the same. Quietly, like a numb, dazed creature, he would rise and drag himself back to the open summit and his cave, and there would sleep, for an uncalculated period. When he woke he ate; and, in the torpor that followed, the great calm would descend on him again.