Page:Rabindranath Tagore - A Biographical Study.djvu/86

 alike consumed. What wonder that the dreamer of the vision calls aloud in his invocation:

The refrain of Meher Ali, the mad old fellow who haunts the palace ruins, "Keep away, keep away! all false, all false!" sends at last the bewildered cotton-surveyor to ask the permanent clerk at the office what it can all mean? But the old clerk can only affirm again that they who enter the palace do so at their peril. Its hungry stones, fired by the measureless lusts and ungratified desires of those who once lived in the palace, seek like a demon for a living man to devour. Old Meher Ali alone has escaped after the three fatal nights required to work their spells; and even he did so at the cost of his senses. Hence his ominous cry: "Keep away, all false, keep away!"

Now, when we think of places on which romance has breathed the spell of a past crowded with apparitions and filled with half-realisable