w-born, wet with
moisture of birth, lay a day-old calf of the herd whose mother had
died. The fettered elephant, forgetting his own agony, said: "If I do
not help this suckling it will perish under our feet." So he stood
above the young thing, making his legs buttresses against the uneasily
moving herd; and he begged milk of a virtuous cow, and the calf throve,
and the ringed elephant was the calf's guide and defence. Now the days
of an elephant--let all listen to the Tataka!--are thirty-five years to
his full strength, and through thirty-five Rains the ringed elephant
befriended the younger, and all the while the fetter ate into the flesh.

'Then one day the young elephant saw the half-buried iron, and turning
to the elder said: "What is this?" "It is even my sorrow," said he
who had befriended him. Then that other put out his trunk and in the
twinkling of an eyelash abolished the ring, saying: "The appointed
time has come." So the virtuous elephant who had waited temperately
and done kind acts was relieved, at the appointed time, by the very
calf whom he had turned aside to cherish--let all listen to the Tataka!
for the Elephant was Ananda, and the Calf that broke the ring was none
other than The Lord Himself...'

Then he would shake his head benignly, and over the ever-clicking
rosary point out how free that elephant-calf was from the sin of pride.
He was as humble as a chela who, seeing his master sitting in the dust
outside the Gates of Learning, over-leapt the gates (though they were
locked) and took his master to his heart in the presence of the
proud-stomached city. Rich would be the reward of such a master and
such a chela when the time came for them to seek freedom together!

So did the lama speak, coming and going across India as softly as a
bat. A sharp-tongued old woman in a house among the fruit-trees behind
Saharunpore honoured him as the woman honoured the prophet, but his
chamber was by no means upon the wall. In an apartment of the
forecourt overlooked by cooing doves he would sit, while she laid aside
her useless veil and chattered of spirits and fiends of Kulu, of
grandchildren unborn, and of the free-tongued brat who had talked to
her in the resting-place. Once, too, he strayed alone from the Grand
Trunk Road below Umballa to the very village whose priest had tried to
drug him; but the kind Heaven that guards lamas sent him at twilight
through the crops, absorbed and unsuspicious, to