“Turn back the chariot. What heart have I for pleasures! Tear down the garlands. Where is there room for joy! I have seen what I have seen.” And, wordless, Channa turned the white horses, and guided the chariot along the way it came and the people fell back to make way, and men and women hid their faces like mourners for it seemed as though in the knowledge of the Prince knowledge had come to them also of the terror of life and the doom inevitable. CHAPTER V NOW when Siddhartha returned to the Garden House, one ran before him and told the women what had occurred and the ladies bore the news to the Princess where she waited, and when she heard it she said: “O ill-foreboding heart of mine! Did I not know that the anger of the Gods must burn against those who would conceal their righteous doom from any man born upon this cruel earth? For who can fight with fate? If this drives my lord to despair, what shall be done?” So she sent messages to the Maharaja telling him the danger and went forth into the Painted Hall to seek the Prince, and he sat there alone, surrounded by lovely images painted upon the walls, where joy and triumph and love clasped hands, and dancing limbs shone amongst flowers and all the world was white with spring. Now something in his eyes held his wife from him and she had no courage to draw near, and went and sat herself humbly on the ground before him but at a distance, and at last he said: “This was the secret. You knew it and did not tell me.” And in the hall was no sound. “You saw me fed with lies such as these—” (and he flung out his arm against the pictures) “and you did not tell me they were the mask of horror.” She bowed her head upon her hands speechless. “And I, most pitiable, most ignorant, rejoiced that a son should be given to me, not knowing that such a one is born to a heritage of wretchedness and the inevitable approach of shame and ruin. And from this is no escape, for the Gods have appointed no end to our misery, no door from the prison, but we must live eternally and horribly, old and disgraced in body and mind. Could a man but end it and fall into the dark and be forgotten! O had I known, no child of mine should ever have felt the whip and dragged the chain. I will not blame you who are but a woman,—but my father—my father.” And in the hall was no sound at all. And the Princess, hiding her face, thought, “Shall I tell him of the end—of Death?” But she dared not. And he called aloud for the women and said: “Deface these pictures for they are lies, and the sight of them turns the knife in the wound. Blot them out with blackness.”