How, through three long years, he managed so to occupy his mind as to keep at bay the madness that besets the absolutely solitary, he himself knew best. Probably the first months seemed longest. The hours were dismissed, one by one, while he busied himself over little things; for, at his age, he was not able to create a systematic pursuit. His mind worked in unaccustomed spheres, conning, vaguely and indefinitely, problems that put him at a more or less safe distance from himself. In time, the atmosphere of the deep banyan shade, with the near tinkling and flashing of the brook, and the dim, greenish sunlight that slipped through the interwoven foliage, became so beautifully familiar that it was home to him. He bathed and floated in the chilly water, and afterwards kindled a sacrificial fire and sat before it on his knees, delighting in the high-leaping flames, feeling that the play of the two elements satisfied his bent of mind. And during this time, by unconscious cerebration, what Oman had learned in his five years of studentship, all that mass of inert, half-decayed knowledge, concentrated into living truths that fixed themselves firmly in his brain and lay waiting to be used. Something further still came out of the solitude:—a self-dependence, a strength, and a fortitude without which, at a later period, he could not have lived. Thus, until his sixteenth year, Oman spent his days. Then a change came upon him, and he felt this life unendurable. Insensibly, a scene from one of the old, heroic epics that he had read in his student days, came to him, fastened itself in his mind, and would not be dislodged. It was the picture of the “Sinner’s Road”, described with ghastly vividness by a long-dead writer: “A burning forest shut the roadside in On either hand; and mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames— Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumes And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts, Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths That hungered, but were never full.” Here, in the land where these dim spirits dwelt, Oman, in perilous despair, beheld himself. He must die as he had lived, and live in death as he had lived in life—miserable, desolate, desperate, without hope of betterment. And then, as the days scourged him, he was finally driven to take a stand, for sanity’s sake. Thus, one noontide, he girded himself up and returned to Bul-Ruknu, and there, within his father’s house, sought an interview with Gokarna.