Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/246

 Master was seized with pity. For blood streamed down the creature's breast, and the wounds from the lances of his tormentors were many. But his pity deepened as he saw there before him, not merely a wounded, but a hapless, creature who had become the prey to a passion of blind rage—a creature dowered by nature with courage and enormous strength, but gifted with little understanding, and robbed of that little by the cruelty of base men, who had roused it to the condition of madness in which it was actually being brought to destroy a Buddha—a poor, wild, dazed brute, and not likely, save with great difficulty and after endlessly long wanderings, to attain a propitious human existence, and to enter the path that leads to salvation.

"Filled full of pity as he was, the Master could feel no fear; and no thought of his own danger arose within him. For he reasoned thus: 'If I should succeed in casting even the faintest ray of light into this tempestuous darkness, such a spark of light would gradually grow; and when this creature, led by its glimmer, arrived at human existence, then it would find on earth the doctrine of the Master it had once killed, and this teaching would help it to salvation.'

"Possessed by this thought, the Master halted in the middle of the road, raised his hand with a calming gesture, looked lovingly at the raging creature, and uttered gentle words, the sound of which reached its savage heart. The giant beast stopped in his charge, rocked his mountain of a head irresolutely back and forth, and, instead of the thundering peal heard from him a moment before, gave vent to one or two almost timid trumpet-calls. At the same time he tossed his trunk into the air and swung it in every direction as if seeking something—like the wounded