give no help,
being afraid of their Mahratta masters.

They had crossed a gully through which a mountain runlet descended,
unrolling a ribbon of green mossy herbage on its way, and slipping
out of sight over the edge of a precipice of two hundred feet or so.
Beyond this the eye saw nothing but clouds of mist heaving and
smoking to the very lip of the fall. Young Prior halted for a moment
on the farther slope to take breath, and precisely at that moment
something happened which he lived to relate a hundred times and
always with wonder. For as his eye fell on these clouds of mist, a
beam of light came travelling swiftly down the mountain and pierced
them, turning them to a fierce blood-red; next, almost with an
audible rush, the sun leapt into view over the eastern spurs: and
while he stared down upon the vapours writhing and bleeding under
this lance-thrust of dawn--while they shook themselves loose and
trailed away in wreaths of crimson and gold and violet, and deep in
the chasms between them shone the plain with its tilled fields and
villages--a cry from Bhagwan Dass fetched him round sharply, and he
beheld, a few yards above him on the slope, a man.

The man sat, naked to the waist, at the entrance of a low cave or
opening in the hillside. He seemed to be of great age, with a calm
and almost unwrinkled face and gray locks falling to his shoulders,
around which hung a rosary of black beads, very highly polished and
flashing against the sun. From the waist down he was wrapped in a
bright yellow shawl, and beside him lay a crutch and a wooden bowl
heaped with rice and conserves.

Before the two Britons could master their dismay, Bhagwan Dass had
run towards the cave and was imploring the holy man to give them
shelter and hiding. For a while he listened merely, and his first
response was to lift the bowl and invite them with a gesture to stay
their hunger. Famished though they were, they hesitated, and reading
the reason in their eyes, he spoke for the first time.

"It will not harm you," said he in Hindustani: "and the villagers
below bring me more than I can eat."

From the moment of setting eyes on him--Prior used to declare--a
blessed sense of protection fell upon the party; a feeling that in
the hour of extreme need God had suddenly put out a shield, under the
shadow of which they might rest in perfect confidence. And indeed,
though they knew the mountain to be swarming with their enemies, they
entered