Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/23

 I thanked my father with tears of joy, and a few days later bade farewell to my parents and home.

With what joyful anticipation did my heart beat as, at the head of my wagons, I passed out at the city gates, a member of this magnificent procession, and the wide world lay open before me! Each day of the journey was to me like a festival, and when the camp fires blazed up in the evenings to scare the panthers and tigers away, and I sat in the circle by the side of the ambassador, with men of years and rank, it seemed to me that I was altogether in fairyland.

Through the magnificent forest region of Vedisa and over the gently swelling heights of the Vindhya mountains we reached the vast northern plain, and there an entirely new world opened itself out before me, for I had hitherto never imagined that the earth was so flat and so huge.

It was about a month after our setting out that, one glorious evening, we saw, from a palm-covered eminence, two golden bands, which, disengaging themselves from the mists on the horizon, threaded the illimitable green beneath and gradually approached each other till they became united in one broad one.

A hand touched my shoulder.

It was the ambassador, who had approached me unperceived.

"Those, Kamanita, are the sacred Jumna and the divine Gunga whose waters unite before our eyes."

Involuntarily I raised my hands in adoration.

"Thou dost well to greet them in this way," my patron went on. "For if the Gunga comes from the home of the gods amid the snow-clad mountains of the North and flows as it were from the Abode of the Eternal, yet the Jumna, on the other hand, takes its rise in lands known