Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/252

 like one who hears a new song utterly unlike any other he has ever heard, a song of which he is able to catch but a few words, yet the music of which penetrates his heart, telling him everything. And what music! Notes of such crystal purity that all other sounds when compared with it must seem to the listener like empty noise, strains bringing greetings from so far away, from so far above the spheres, that a new and undreamt-of longing is awakened, of which one felt that it can never be stilled by anything earthly or earth-like, and which, if unsatisfied, will never pass away.

Meanwhile night had come down. The pale light of the moon, as it rose behind the temple, threw shadows from the latter right across the whole width of the forest glade. The form of the speaker was all but undistinguishable. These more than human words appeared to come forth from the sanctuary itself that had swallowed again into its mass of shadow all the thousand wild and tangled, life-simulating forms, and now towered upward in simple but imposing lines, a monument of all terrestrial and celestial life.

My hands folded about my knees, I sat there listening and looking up to the heavens, where great stars glittered over the dark tree-tops, and the heavenly Gunga lay extended like a river of light. Then I remembered the hour when we both, at that same spot, solemnly raised our hands to it, and mutually swore by its silver floods which feed these lotus lakes, that we would meet here again in the Paradise of the West—in a heaven of pleasure like to that of Krishna, of which the Master had just spoken, as of the place which the faithful strove to reach.

And as I thought of it, my heart grew sad; but I could trace no desire in myself for such a life in Paradise, for