His tempests were always a source of deep trouble and dejection to him. That incomprehensible womanishness that lived within him he half despised and half deplored. When she was uppermost, she was pitiable enough. Her high, wailing voice roused the dreariest echoes among the surrounding rocks; and one hearing them might have fancied himself listening to a chorus of damned souls wandering along the road to Kutashala Mali. This weaker spirit used, in the beginning, to be roused by the thunderstorms which, from time to time, raged across the heights. With the first hissing fire-streak that crossed the sky, Oman’s frame would be shaken by a quiver of terror, and he would cower away into his rude habitation, and, covering his face, remain moaning and trembling with every crash, every blaze of lightning, every fresh onslaught of cold rain. To him it was as if these phenomena brought back some experience of the dimly veiled past, when, in words that smote his ears like the near thunder itself, he had heard pronounced on him a doom, and had thenceforth been plunged into deepest night. After the passing of the storm, when the stars came radiantly forth upon the newly refreshed sky, or the sun shone through an upstretched, radiant bow, there would steal upon the stricken creature of the cave a sense of comfort and consolation almost repaying the evil hour of fear. At such times, Oman would put away his sense of wretchedness and shame; and his heart would open out in praise. What he should praise, whom, which of the gods his life had known, he could not tell. None of them all—Siva, Vishnu, Indra, not the Buddha himself—could satisfy his new, groping sense. But the searching, seeking, wondering after the unknown, the greatly desired, usually led him back into his state of meditation, where he could claim himself again a man.