Part 3 (1/2)
”You are going to see the naked heart of India!” she said ”Better to have your eyes burned out now than see that and be false to it afterward!”
Then, since we failed to order red-hot needles for our eyes, she cried out once-one clear note that sounded al A wo echo to it Yasain
Below us the river sed and gurgled along the palace wall, and we caught the occasional thu ceased exactly underneath us, and a e of Rajasthan I think he was looking upward as he sang, for each word reached its goal
”Oh warm and broad the plow land lies, The idle oxen wait!
We pray thee, holy river, rise, Nor glut thy fields too late!
The year awakes! The slu seed Swells to its birth! Oh river, heed!”
”Strange ti, Princess! Is that one of your spies?” asked King, not too politely
”One of my friends,” she answered ”I told you: India awakes! But watch”
It was growing dark Toht laht tapers and lit the candles in the hydra-headed candelabra
”It is really too light yet,” Yasht had not kept faith with her But even so, the shadows danced a the row of stools
Then there began ind esting unih the curtains opposite there came in silently seven women on bare feet that hardly touched the carpet; and all the stories about nautch girls, all the travelers' tales of how Eastern women dance with their ardoer seeht and other limitations; their footfall was hardly audible, and you could not hear the shadows, and they danced the way the shadows of the branches do on a jungle clearing when a light breeze h
It had soh I did not understand it; but what I did understand was that the whole arrangened to produce a sort of mesmerism in the beholder
However, school yourself to live alone and think alone for a quarter of a century or so,people only asa flock of sheep, and you beco
The Princess Yas drawn into the net of drea
”Watch!” said Yasmini suddenly And then hat very few ed to see
She joined the dance; and you knew then who had taught those women Theirs had been after all a mere interpretation: of her vision Hers was the vision itself
She was It-the thing itself-noin nature is Yas and I had understood her ould have been swept into her vortex, as it were, like drops of water into an ocean
She was unrestrained by any need, or even willingness to explain herself She was talking the saht and shadow talk that go chasing each other across the hillsides And while you watched you sees-secrets that disappeared fro presently, co on theconventional li first of the e of the birth of peoples; of the history of peoples
She sang of India as the e; of truths that every great thinker since the world's beginning has propounded; and of India as the home of all of them, until, whether you would or not, at least you seemed to see the undeniable truth of that
And then, in a weird, wild, e of darkness creeping over India, condeliness and ignorance and plague, and yet of a feho kept the old light burning in secret-of hidden books, and of stuff that ic handed down the centuries from lip to lip in caves and temple cellars and mountain fastnesses, wherever the mysteries were safe fro that fundamental middle F that is the mother-note of all the voices of nature and, as Indiansand dance beca left to doubt, as she began to sing of India rising at last, again triumphant over darkness, mother of the world and of all the nations of the world, awake, unconquerable
Never was another song like that one! Nor was there ever such a climax As she finished on a chord of triu the bonds of ancienther women, there stood the Gray Mahater, but clothed from head to heel in a saffron-colored robe, and without his paste of ashes
He stood like a statue with folded ar and his look like a lion's; and how he had entered the roo, who is a trained observer of unusual happenings Both doors were closed, and I will take oath that neither had been opened since the women entered