scribe it in
the ordinary terms of human experience, or whether to look on it as
a weird dream of the bygone ages of another world. As for myself,
I had not been wandering among its ochre-habited devotees for a
quarter of an hour before my mind involuntarily reverted to a time,
many years past, when I was a student of mental disease in Bethlem
Hospital, and to a dream I had had at that time, when I imagined I
found myself an inmate, no longer as a psychological student, but with
the indescribably uncanny feeling, "I am one of them myself. Now these
madmen around me are only counterparts of myself." So now, as some
of these forms of voluntary self-torture and eccentricity, nudity,
or ash-besmeared bodies, aroused feelings of abhorrence, I had to
check myself with the thought: "But you yourself are one of them too:
these weird Sadhus are your accepted brothers in uniform." And so the
illusion continued so long as I moved among them, and when finally
I left Rishikes behind me, it was like waking from some nightmare.

Accompany me round the imaginary wards, and we will first visit that
for imbeciles. We find most of them sitting out in the jungle under
trees or mats, avoiding the proximity of their fellow-creatures,
recoiling from any intrusion on their privacy, preserving a vacuous
expression and an unbroken silence, resenting any effort to draw
them into conversation or to break into the impassivity of their
abstraction. They do not look up as you approach; they offer you no
sign of recognition; whether you seat yourself or remain standing,
they show no consciousness of your presence. Flies may alight on their
faces, but still their eyes remain fixed on the tip of their noses,
and their hands remain clasping their crossed legs. They have sought
to obtain fusion with the Eternal Spirit by cultivating an ecstatic
vacuity of mind, and have fallen into the error of imagining that the
material part of their nature can be etherealized by merely ignoring
it, until the process of atrophy from disuse often proceeds so far that
there is no mind left to be etherealized at all, and there is little
left to distinguish them from one of those demented unfortunates who
have been deprived by disease of that highest ornament of humanity.

Leaving these, let us proceed to the ward set apart for delusional
insanity. The first Sadhu tells you that he is possessed by a spirit
which forbids him to eat except every third day. Another avers that