m, open to
the clean air all round the roof, and with a kind of rough enclosure on
the wooden floor where the family slept at night. There he opened our
basket, and then, with anxious care, hung clothes and rough draperies
about us that our meal might be unwatched by one or two friends who had
followed us in with breathless interest. Still further to entertain us
a great rarity was brought out and laid at Vanna's feet as something
we might like to watch--a curious bird in a cage, with brightly barred
wings and a singular cry. She fed it with fruit, and it fluttered to her
hand. Just so Abraham might have welcomed his guests, and when we left
with words of deepest gratitude, our host made the beautiful obeisance
of touching his forehead with joined hands as he bowed. To me the whole
incident had an extraordinary grace, and ennobled both host and guest.
But we met an ascending scale of loveliness so varied in its aspects
that I passed from one emotion to another and knew no sameness.

That afternoon the camp was pitched at the foot of a mighty hill, under
the waving pyramids of the chenars, sweeping their green like the robes
of a goddess. Near by was a half circle of low arches falling into
ruin, and as we went in among them I beheld a wondrous sight--the huge
octagonal tank or basin made by the Mogul Emperor Jehangir to receive
the waters of a mighty Spring which wells from the hill and has been
held sacred by Hindu and Moslem. And if loveliness can sanctify surely
it is sacred indeed.

The tank was more than a hundred feet in diameter and circled by a
roughly paved pathway where the little arched cells open that the
devotees may sit and contemplate the lustral waters. There on a black
stone, is sculptured the Imperial inscription comparing this spring to
the holier wells of Paradise, and I thought no less of it, for it rushes
straight from the rock with no aiding stream, and its waters are fifty
feet deep, and sweep away from this great basin through beautiful low
arches in a wild foaming river--the crystal life-blood of the mountains
for ever welling away. The colour and perfect purity of this living
jewel were most marvellous--clear blue-green like a chalcedony, but
changing as the lights in an opal--a wonderful quivering brilliance,
flickering with the silver of shoals of sacred fish.

But the Mogul Empire is with the snows of yesteryear and the wonder has
passed from the Moslems into the keeping of the Hindus onc