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He followed the Himalaya-Thibet road, the little ten-foot track that is blasted out of solid rock, or strutted out on timbers over gulfs a thousand feet deep; that dips into warm, wet, shut-in valleys, and climbs out across bare, grassy hill-shoulders where the sun strikes like a burning-glass; or turns through dripping, dark forests where the tree-ferns dress the trunks from head to heel, and the pheasant calls to his mate. And he met Thibetan herdsmen with their dogs and flocks of sheep, each sheep with a little bag of borax on his back, and wandering wood-cutters, and cloaked and blanketed Lamas from Thibet… |
This is from “The Miracle of Purun Baghat”, in The Second Jungle Book. Sir Purun Dass, the distinguished Prime-Minister of a native state, has renounced worldly success and become a wandering holy man, begging for his food. Here he is headiing up into the hills of his people, where he will find a shrine to meditate on the nature of things, as the years pass. Years later, in a final decisive act in the depths of a wet night, he will save the folk of his adopted village from death by landslide. |
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