ights and find
them."

And next moment she was planning the camping details, the men, the
ponies, with a practical zest that seemed to relegate the occult to the
absurd. Yet the very next day came a wonderful moment.

The sun was just setting and, as it were, suddenly the purple glooms
banked up heavy with thunder. The sky was black with fury, the earth
passive with dread. I never saw such lightning--it was continuous and
tore in zigzag flashes down the mountains like rents in the substance
of the world's fabric. And the thunder roared up in the mountain gorges
with shattering echoes. Then fell the rain, and the whole lake seemed to
rise to meet it, and the noise was like the rattle of musketry. We were
standing by the cabin window and she suddenly caught my hand, and I
saw in a light of their own two dancing figures on the tormented water
before us. Wild in the tumult, embodied delight, with arms tossed
violently above their heads, and feet flung up behind them, skimming the
waves like seagulls, they passed. Their sex I could not tell--I think
they had none, but were bubble emanations of the rejoicing rush of the
rain and the wild retreating laughter of the thunder. I saw the fierce
aerial faces and their inhuman glee as they fled by, and she dropped my
hand and they were gone. Slowly the storm lessened, and in the west the
clouds tore raggedly asunder and a flood of livid yellow light poured
down upon the lake--an awful light that struck it into an abyss of fire.
Then, as if at a word of command, two glorious rainbows sprang across
the water with the mountains for their piers, each with its proper
colours chorded. They made a Bridge of Dread that stood out radiant
against the background of storm--the Twilight of the Gods, and the
doomed gods marching forth to the last fight. And the thunder growled
sullenly away into the recesses of the hill and the terrible rainbows
faded until the stars came quietly out and it was a still night.

But I had seen that what is our dread is the joy of the spirits of the
Mighty Mother, and though the vision faded and I doubted what I had
seen, it prepared the way for what I was yet to see. A few days later we
started on what was to be the most exquisite memory of my life. A train
of ponies carried our tents and camping necessaries and there was a
pony for each of us. And so, in the cool grey of a divine morning, with
little rosy clouds flecking the eastern sky, we set out from Islamaba