CHAPTER IV
See the fakir as he swings in his iro n ;
See the thin hermit th a t starves in the w ild ;
Think ye no pleasures the penance environ,
And hope the sole bliss by which pain is beguil’
No ! 'in the kingdom those spirits are reaching,
Vain are our words those emotions to te l l ;
Vain the distinctions our senses are teaching,
For pain has its heaven and pleasure its hell.
^^^MoncTcton Milnes.
Of religions, painful and o th erw is^H How I seek secularity
along a scorching road, and am made to take p a rt in sacred-
rites—I write a character for a saint—And am rewarded
with roses and watercress.
A f e w miles above Bijbeharra was Islamabad, the
principal commercial centre in the eastern part of
Kashmir. The town itself stands back some two miles
from the river, the actual waterside village being
Kanabal. I t is the starting point to many routes—
to Poonch, Jammu, and the eastern ranges; and Kulu,
Ladakh, and Rupshu can also be reached this way. I
found it a religious place in a showy, picturesque, casual
fashion, and in the course of a morning stroll some
curiosities in worship showed themselves. The first
was an Asiatic fakir of a most uncompromising type,
who had been found many years before half-dead in the
snow. Where he had come from, what his object—if he
had one—no one could ever know, for he never opened
his mouth, asked for nothing, made no comment. All
day long he sat in his tent, silent, swathed in a shawl,
sad-eyed, serious, drinking water or eating a little grain
when held to his lips by one of the disciples who took
it in turn to sit beside him. At night he hung from
a rope suspended by his crooked knees, head downward,
resting on a wooden prop supplied by the
generosity of some worshippers. Por a long period he
had rested without support. The man was no mere
epileptic. As I dropped a copper into his bowl he
glanced up with some curiosity in his eyes, and a strong,
intelligent expression. What thoughts filled that
brain, I wondered; had some strange secrets been
wrested by him from some storehouse of human knowledge
unknown to ordinary science; was his life one
long endurance of the hours, or had he attacked and
conquered one corner of the limitless desert of human
ignorance ? Strange that silence and seclusion should
stamp a man so strongly with the mark of another
world, for though he practised no rites, followed no
religion, yet from the mere aloofness of his existence
people were ready to conclude him a saint, and whether
Hindu or Mahomedan, to treat him with the respect
due to beings who live apart from the lines of ordinary
human intercourse. We seek a heaven through the
perfection of practical life. The Hindus turn their
back on all that restrains the contemplative side of
character. The course of existence can thus be diverted
into different channels. But have either they or we
discovered a royal road to the understanding of the
world, or a golden clue to the unlocking of the doors