But “Everything is in being through ignorance--when we are awake our dreams are false,” was the only remark made by my friend to these heroics: and he yawned politely, and seemed to have lost all interest in the Ten-handed. VI THE KING OF DEATH It is in the villages, remote from railways that I have found the rarer God-tales, villages got at by long journeys of road and water, past lotus beds, the pink-white blossom growing waist high among leaves large as sun-hats; past groups of mat huts tottering against each other, past palm trees and green swamps of mosquitoes; past stretch of brown earth waiting patiently, face upturned, for the rain that comes not; once, past the quaintest requiem ever written in Nature.... It is a moment worth recall. A slow newly-constructed railway was making its weary way on a hot afternoon in June from mango-grove to river-bank and ferry steamer. It was the usual up-country landscape, one barely looked at it, till, suddenly a change--a great zone of sand, lying in _waves_, waves patterned like the ripple of water, and glistening--Earth’s diamond tiara--in the fierce white light of the Sun-God.... A hot wind smote the face like a furnace-blast; the glare was a flame-red brand across the eyes ... no relief anywhere, and yet, a strange sense of freedom in this sea of sand waves. Under a bare tree of white thorns lay a small bundle of pink rags, a child with a shock head of hair, the only bit of life and colour anywhere it seemed at first. She lay quite still, on her back, motionless. In the distance across the sand walked a woman, slowly, painfully; on her head was a water-pot, she walked away from the child, but every now and then she turned to look at the tree of white thorns. You knew what she sought ... would she find it? and having found would she be in time? The train crawled on to the river, and there was the woman ever walking away and away, and ever turning to look back; and the child under the shelter of a handful of thorn-needles still, so still, and the sun smiting on the gleaming sand.... From the river in the growing dusk I saw my diamond tiara changed to moonstones.... The great zone was now but a soft white sheen, a City of Light, and the minarets of some place of Saints towered above the battlements. “A very holy man lived there,” they told me later. It is where holy men should live, it seemeth me, on the Sands of Time, their faces to that other fleeting Earth-force the River of Life....