re was nothing but a mean smell and a few old men
with rakes gathering up ashes. But outside the ghat, where a golden
mohur tree cast a wide shadow across the road there was a large crowd
sitting and standing in rings around an absolutely naked, ash-smeared
religious fanatic.

The fanatic appeared to have the crowd bewildered, for he cursed and
blessed on no comprehensible schedule, and gave extraordinary answers to
the simplest questions, not acknowledging a question at all unless it
suited him.

King and I had not been there a minute before some one asked him about
the Princess Yasmini.

"Aha! Who stares at the fire burns his eyes! A burned eye is of less use
than a raw one!"

Some laughed, but not many. Most of them seemed to think there was deep
wisdom in his answer to be dug for meditatively, as no doubt there was.
Then a man on the edge of the crowd a long way off from me, who wore the
air of a humorist, asked him about me.

"Does the shadow of this foreigner offend your honor's holiness?"

None glanced in my direction; that might have given the game away. It is
considered an exquisite joke to discuss a white man to his face without
his knowing it. The Gray Mahatma did not glance in my direction either.

"As a bird in the river--as a fish in the air--as a man in trouble is
the foreigner in Hind!" he answered.

Then he suddenly began, declaiming, making his voice ring as if his
throat were brass, yet without moving his body or shifting his head by a
hair's breadth.

"The universe was chaos. _He_ said, let order prevail, and order came
out of the chaos and prevailed. The universe was in darkness. _He_ said,
let there be light and let it prevail over darkness; and light came out
of the womb of darkness and prevailed. _He_ ordained the _Kali-Yug_--an
age of darkness in which all Hind should lie at the feet of foreigners.
And thus ye lie in the dust. But there is an end of night, and so there
is an end to _Kali-Yug_. Bide ye the time, and watch!"

King drew me away, and we returned up-street between old temples and new
iron-fronted stores toward Mulji Singh's quarters where he had left the
traveling bag that we shared between us.

"Is that Gray Mahatma linked up with propaganda in the U.S.A?" I asked,
wondering.

"What's more," King answered, "he's dangerous; he's sincere--the most
dangerous type of politician in the world--the honest visionary, in love
with an abstract theory, capable of offering himsel