A BURIED ANCHORITE 225
most uncanny thing I saw in all Tibet. What on
earth was going to appear when that stone slab, which
even then was beginning weakly to quiver, was pushed
aside, the wildest conjecture could not suggest. After
half a minute’s pause the stone moved, or tried to move,
but it came to rest again. Then very slowly and uncertainly
it was pushed back and a black chasm was
revealed. There was again a pause of thirty seconds,
during which imagination ran riot, but I do not think
that any other thing could have been as intensely
pathetic as that which we actually saw. A hand,
muffled in a tightly-wound piece of dirty cloth, for all
the world like the stump of an arm, was painfully thrust
up, and very weakly it felt along the slab. After a
fruitless fumbling the hand slowly quivered back again
into the darkness. A few moments later there was
again one ineffectual effort, and then the stone slab
moved noiselessly again across the opening. Once a
day, water and an unleavened cake of flour is placed
for the prisoner upon that slab, the signal is given and
he may take it in. His diversion is over for the day,
and in the darkness of his cell, where night and day,
moon, sunset, and the dawn are all alike, he poor soul
had thought that another day of his long penance was
over.
I do not know what feelings were uppermost at that
moment in the others, but I know that a physical chill
struck through me to the marrow. The awful pathos
of that painful movement struggled in me with an
intense shame that we had intruded ourselves upon a
private misery; and that we should have added one
straw to the burden borne in the darkness by that unseen
and unhappy man, was a curiously poignant regret.
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