e found, even by the body; but alas! the body cannot
travel so easily as the soul: since, in his haste, the Creator has
forgotten to give wings to anything but birds. And yet, the only thing
to do is to hunt for her incessantly, and go from place to place
without stopping for a moment: since very certainly she will never be
discovered if I remain here as motionless as a hill. So I must escape
at once, on some pretence, without letting anybody know why.

And as I said, I did: and this was the very reason why I broke with my
relations, and became a vagrant instead of a king's heir. And every
night I went to sleep yearning to dream the dream again, and yet it
never came, though even in my sleep I seemed in every dream to be
roaming everlastingly in jungles, and along roads that never ended,
always on the very point of finding something that I never found. And
strange! instead of driving me to despair, this constant failure
actually gave me courage, for I said: If the dream had really been
only a dream and nothing more, it would surely have returned, beyond a
doubt: since, as a rule, dreams are only pictures in the night of what
men think of in the day. And yet she never comes again, although I
think of nothing else, all day long, and she was very certainly no
picture of anything that I ever saw before. And clearly, it must be
that my soul did actually find her, though now it has lost its way,
and does not know how to return.

And in the meanwhile, as time went on, the less I found her, the more
I fell back upon my lute, which became the only confidante of my
secret, and my sole refuge in my desolation. And I used to sit
playing, thinking all the while of nothing but herself, so that she
gradually became as it were the theme and the undertone of every air.
And the listeners would say: Ha! now beyond a doubt this player on the
lute must be some incarnation of a Kinnara, for the sound of his music
resembles that of the wind singing in the hollows of the bamboos that
wave over waterfalls on the sides of the snowy mountain: and his lute
seems to sob, in the vain endeavour to express some melancholy secret
that for want of words it cannot articulately tell, wringing as it
were its hands of strings, for very grief: And I became a byword, and
the fame of my music was carried into the quarters of the world, like
the scent of the sandal that the breeze blows from the Malaya hill in
the region of the South.

And then at last I cam