King and I had not been there a minute before some one asked him about the Princess Yasmini.
"Aha! Who stares at the fire burns his eyes! A burned eye is of less use than a raw one!"
Some laughed, but not many. Most of them seemed to think there was deep wisdom in his answer to be dug for meditatively, as no doubt there was. Then a man on the edge of the crowd a long way off from me, who wore the air of a humorist, asked him about me.
"Does the shadow of this foreigner offend your honor's holiness?"
None glanced in my direction; that might have given the game away. It is considered an exquisite joke to discuss a white man to his face without his knowing it. The Gray Mahatma did not glance in my direction either.
"As a bird in the river—as a fish in the air—as a man in trouble is the foreigner in Hind!" he answered.
Then he suddenly began, declaiming, making his voice ring as if his throat were brass, yet without moving his body or shifting his head by a hair's breadth.
"The universe was chaos. He said, let order prevail, and order came out of the chaos and prevailed. The universe was in darkness. He said, let there be light and let it prevail over darkness; and light came out of the womb of darkness and prevailed. He ordained the Kali-Yug—an age of darkness in which all Hind should lie at the feet of foreigners. And thus ye lie in the dust. But there is an end of night, and so there is an end to Kali-Yug. Bide ye the time, and watch!"
King drew me away, and we returned up-street between old temples and new iron-fronted stores toward Mulji Singh's quarters where he had left the traveling bag that we shared between us.
"Is that Gray Mahatma linked up with propaganda in the U.S.A?" I asked, wondering.