“NO haste, but no delay.” Gandhi had used the very words in suggesting that it would be well for Dicky to join Nagar in the north. The American telegraphed that he would reach Amritsar on the evening of the ninth, and made his way northward leisurely, stopping over in Cawnpore, for a full day. It was in Cawnpore, toward midday, after a two hours’ ramble in white dust and the killing colorless heat, that Dicky halted in the shade of a little grove of mangoes. He took off his helmet and mopped his brow with a piece of silk already damp. In the shade, at a slight distance (his left foot twisted into the ground), sat an ascetic who kept on with his muttering, not turning the way of the American.
The look of an iron statue suggested itself. There were ashes, and worse, in the holy man’s hair, and in one empty eye socket. The hands were held out in space—twisted, seared hands, but so moveless that Dicky thought of the iron statue again. The wrists were thick and very strong. Cobden squinted his eyes back toward the pitiless Indian street, and then he perceived the Hindu’s face turned to him. A single vivid eye held him, as by the scruff of the neck. The voice was deep and resonant as from one who had learned to breathe, a rare art. The words in English were quietly spoken:
“It is written, my son, that you are to come to the end of your search within six days.”
Dicky edged closer, and asked courteously: “Do you really get it that way?”
“So it reads in the crystals. To one who truly reads, the tale is one—whether read in the crystals or the stars.”
The holy man lifted from between his thighs a handful of stained and rusty stones.
“You will go to a wall,” he added studiously. “You will enter through the gate of the wall——”
“What wall, father?”
“Who knows? I see the wall. The end comes within six days, and there is tumult.”
“The end of my life?”