neakers are skin-comfortable; again
I am squatted on a pleasant mat of leaves in a miniature gorge, miles
back of my Kartabo bungalow. Life elsewhere has already become
unthinkable. I recall a place boiling with worried people, rent with
unpleasing sounds, and beset with unsatisfactory pleasures. In less
than a year I shall long for a sight of these worried people, my ears
will strain to catch the unpleasing sounds, and I shall plunge with
joy into the unsatisfactory pleasures. To-day, however, all these have
passed from mind, and I settle down another notch, head snuggled on
knees, and sway, elephant-fashion, with sheer joy, as a musky,
exciting odor comes drifting, apparently by its own volition, down
through the windless little gorge.

If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the
source to be a passing bug,--a giant bug,--related distantly to our
malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as
orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate
volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression--as an
earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles. There is no
breeze, no slightest shift of air-particles; yet down the gorge comes
this cloud,--a cloud unsensible except to nostrils,--eddying as if
swirling around the edges of leaves, riding on the air as gently as
the low, distant crooning of great, sleepy jungle doves.

With two senses so perfectly occupied, sight becomes superfluous and I
close my eyes. And straightway the scent and the murmur usurp my whole
mind with a vivid memory. I am still squatting, but in a dark,
fragrant room; and the murmur is still of doves; but the room is in
the cool, still heart of the Queen's Golden Monastery in northern
Burma, within storm-sound of Tibet, and the doves are perched among
the glitter and tinkling bells of the pagoda roofs. I am squatting
very quietly, for I am tired, after photographing carved peacocks and
junglefowl in the marvelous fretwork of the outer balconies, There
are idols all about me--or so it would appear to a missionary; for my
part, I can think only of the wonderful face of the old Lama who sits
near me, a face peaceful with the something for which most of us would
desert what we are doing, if by that we could attain it. Near him are
two young priests, sitting as motionless as the Buddha in front of
them.

After a half-hour of the strange thing that we call time, the Lama
speaks, very lo