And there was some accent In it of secret dread, of terrible, secret melancholy, deeper than his soul could perceive, his brain could classify. The terror of a mighty struggle was behind it: a mighty struggle awfully remote from individual existence and individual ambition and life, individual death even. It partook of India itself; the land, the ancient races, the very gods.
The farther north he traveled the more strongly grew the shapeless, voiceless impression. At times, suddenly, a light flashed down the hidden tunnels of his inner consciousness, and made visible for one fleeting second something which he seemed too slow to comprehend.
A whisper came to him from beyond the rationally knowable.
And so, two days later, he dropped from the train at a small up-land station that consisted of a chaotic whirlwind of stabbing sand, seven red-necked vultures squatting on a low wall and making unseemly noises, a tumble-down Vishnavite shrine, and a fat, patent-leather-slippered babu, who bowed before Charlie Thorneycroft even lower than the deputy commissioner had done, called him Protec-
