[42] Quoted in the above article. CHAPTER XI THE NAWAB Dacca still wears something of a Mohammedan air, for Akbar’s long arm reached to Eastern Bengal, and the inheritors of his empire here built a fort, a palace, and a capital. Passing one day among its enclosed gardens, mouldering lengths of wall, and dying mosques, I had begun to imagine myself back in some Turkish town like Ochrida or Monastir, when I was suddenly recalled to the streams of Brahmaputra by the appearance of a large wooden cage under a tree in an open court. It was bigger than the cages in which Louis XI. swung his political opponents in the castles of Touraine. It would have held a bull as well as an eagle, and was firmly set upon a base of stone, daubed with vermillion, as is the Hindu way. Life in a cage has always seemed to me so curious a choice when this nutshell of a planet is itself so small, that I stopped to contemplate it, and, observing my interest, the Brahman who accompanied me began to knock with a stone upon a large wooden box, which occupied one corner of the interior. The summons appeared to be recognized, like the call to a menagerie’s wild beast at feeding time. There was a stir inside, a lid opened, and presently a human head emerged shaggy as John the Baptist’s, with black hair. It was the city anchorite, whose sleep or meditation we had rather rudely disturbed. But he took it in good part, as one accustomed to allow for grosser natures, and, raising himself deftly from his lair, he stood naked before us, contemplating this garish muddle of a world with shy and melancholy eyes. Human speech was distasteful to him, but he had come, he said, from a distant province, the name of which did not concern a mind set upon infinity. All his life now he meditated, not directly upon God, but upon the remembered words of his Guru, or spiritual master, which in time might lead him to the meditation upon God Himself. He was unwilling to say more, and, being in haste, I gave him six annas (sixpence) as an endowment of meditation, which appears to me far the most difficult achievement of the human mind, and he crept back into his box to continue it.