Akbar Khân, indeed, he saw, utilizing one of the tall tapers as a pipe-light before casting himself on the ground to suck contentedly at the screwed _banyan_ leaf full of tobacco which he had gathered by claiming a pinch in return for the loan of that same light to others. But with a curious shame Roshan avoided him, and passed on in his search among the jostling crowd, the continuous babel of trivial talk; for this was resting-time, when men and women could be men and women, and forget that they were on a pilgrimage; when they could even dream themselves back in the village under the familiar shelter of some village tree, asking no more than the familiar round of life. But above the babel came every now and again the insistent clang of a bell, telling that some new petitioner was seeking a favour of the Gods, and making a golden oriole, which sat in the green leafage, flit to another bower with a sudden fluting note, full, joyful, mellow. "What dost seek, _Musulmân?_" cavilled a saint, drawing back from Roshan's shadow, as he gabbled invocations, all he knew, on a rosary, ere solacing himself with the pipe which his disciple had prepared. "If 'tis the madman and his God--he hath gone yonder." He pointed to a side track, which was a short cut to the road above. Roshan flung himself from his horse without a word, and followed. The distance lessened at every step now, for the old priest's breath failed him at the steepness of the rise. Still, it would not delay him long, he told himself, to take that one look at the soft, white cloud which generally hid the goal of pilgrimage, before he turned back over the hill, as best he could, to find what task remained for him in the world. He might have that one look, surely! So, reaching the summit of this first bulwark of the unattainable, he sat down, breathlessly, beside an upright black stone which showed strangely distinct amid the redness of the surrounding rock; a plain black stone, not three feet high, chipped rudely to a blunt point. Father Ninian did not need the scattering of dead marigolds and dry basil leaves about its base to tell him that it was a fragment of an older faith than that of the temple below; a faith sterner, purer, founded on a clearer perception of what humanity needed in that search for the lost Paradise; on a closer memory of the cause which lost it. He laid one hand on the stone almost caressingly, as, holding the pyx in the other, he sat down facing the distant peaks. But there was no cloud upon them. The day had dawned clear and still, and as he sat looking wistfully over the valleys on valleys, the hills on hills, which lay bathed in light between him and the "Cradle of the Gods," a sunbeam--still slanting from the curved edge of the eastern plains--caught the jewelled star of what he held, and stayed there.