Page:Shantiniketan; the Bolpur School of Rabindranath Tagore.djvu/78

58 seems indistinct and distant objects are brought near. If it had been daytime, would you have been able so easily to think that you were seeing the stars, which, when the sky is caressed by the shadow of the night, blossom like flowers and fill the heavens in their multitudes?

So far I have been describing the night, in order to carry you in thought out into the darkness, where the sky is decked with the moon and stars. Now you must accompany me in imagination wherever I go.

What journey shall we take together? We are going to visit a sacred grove of ancient India. If it had been daytime, how could you ever have discovered this sacred grove of hundreds of years ago? If it had been daytime, what should we have seen in modern India? We should have seen cities, railways and factories; we should have seen forests full of wild beasts, dried-up rivers, hard rocky mountains, barren parched deserts and many other things besides. The sacred grove I am to tell you about no longer exists.

But it is night time now—moonlight is falling and the silence of sleep has come. Now the mind can take wings and fly in imagination