Solution Manual for Human Physiology 14th Edition Fox

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SECTION_1.pdf Sample_EOC
Answers.pdf
Sample_case_study_answers_female.pdf
SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION: STRUCTURE AND
PHYSIOLOGICAL CONTROL SYSTEMS

EXERCISE 1.1 MICROSCOPIC EXAMINATION OF CELLS

Approximate Time for Completion: 1–1½ hours
Introduction
This exercise introduces students to the microscope, preparation of a slide, and dimensional
analysis (international system of metric units). Based on this, students are able to estimate the
size of microscopic objects. This exercise introduces students to the structures of a cell and to
the organelles found within a cell. Functions of each organelle are introduced, as is the concept
of cell division (mitosis and meiosis).
Materials
1. Compound microscopes
2. Prepared microscope slides: including whitefish blastula (early embryo), clean slides, and cover slips
Note: Slides with dots, lines, or the letter e can be prepared with dry transfer patterns used in artwork.
3. Lens paper and lens cleaner
4. Methylene blue stain
5. Cotton-tipped applicator sticks or toothpicks
6. Glass slides and coverslips
7. Immersion oil

Textbook Correlations: Chapter 3 – Cytoplasm and Its Organelles; DNA Synthesis and Cell Division
Answers to Review Activities Questions
1. a. 100× (40×, this may vary, depending on the microscope)
b. 450× (430×, this may vary, depending on the microscope)
c. 1,000×

2. a. one gram
b. 0 C
c. one liter

3. a. centriole mitochondria
b. endoplasmic reticulum
c. nucleus
d. lysosome
e. ribosome
f.

4. 1. d
2. a
3. c
4. b

5. Mitosis is cell division that occurs in almost all tissues, resulting in the growth and repair of tissues and
organs. Meiosis, by contrast, occurs only in the gonads. Within the gonads are germinal cells that, after

1
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manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in whole or part.
 puberty, result in the production of haploid gametes (sperm and ovum). In the testes, spermatogenesis results
in the formation of four haploid spermatozoa from one diploid parent cell. In the ovaries, oogenesis results
in the formation of a single large haploid egg cell (ovum or oocyte) and a much smaller polar body, that will
degenerate. At the conclusion of mitosis, two identical diploid daughter cells are produced, whereas in
meiosis the daughter cells are haploid and can be used in sexual reproduction to produce a newly diploid
fertilized egg cell, or zygote.

6. In mitosis, the major benefit of lining up homologous chromosomes single-file is to ensure that sister
chromatids are separated cleanly by the spindle fibers and are moved to opposite sides of the dividing cell.
Each daughter cell receives one exact and complete copy of the original genome. In meiosis however, side-by-
side alignment of homologous chromosomes allows the physical exchange of DNA regions (crossing over).
This results in genetic recombination and ensures that the gametes produced are genetically unique.
Furthermore, the attachment of spindle fibers to the maternal and paternal members and, therefore, the
assortment of each homologous pair, are random. This ―shuffling of the deck‖ promotes genetic recombination
and species diversity that contributes to survival of species over evolutionary time.

7. The metric system is the preferred international system of measurement. Based on powers of ten, all
measurements of length, weight, volume, and temperature can easily be converted from one order of
magnitude to another simply by moving the decimal point right or left the correct number of spaces. When
both systems are used, as is true in the United States, the lack of common expression of measurement leads
to public confusion and miscommunication as well as difficulties in exchange of information with the rest of
the metric-based world.

8. 1. c
2. a
3. d
4. b

EXERCISE 1.2 MICROSCOPIC EXAMINATION OF TISSUES AND ORGANS

Approximate Time for Completion: 1–2 hours
Introduction
This exercise helps students improve their microscopic technique while introducing them to histology. This can be a
short introduction or it can be lengthened by a more detailed consideration of the microscopic anatomy of a
representative organ, such as the intestine or skin. A strong understanding of the functions of various tissues will
help students to understand the functions of various organs and organ systems introduced later.
Materials
1. Compound microscopes
2. Lens paper and lens cleaner
3. Prepared microscope slides of tissues
Textbook Correlations: Chapter 1 – The Primary Tissues; Organs and Systems
Answers to Review Activities Questions
1. A tissue is an aggregation of similar cells that work together to perform a specialized activity.

2. An organ is a group of two or more tissues that occur and function together.

3. a. A simple squamous membrane is composed of a single layer of flattened epithelial cells. An example
is the endothelium of blood vessels.

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manner. This document may not be copied, scanned, duplicated, forwarded, distributed, or posted on a website, in whole or part.
 b. A stratified squamous membrane is composed of a number of cell layers with squamous cells at the top
layer. An example is the epidermis of the skin.
c. A columnar epithelium is composed of a single layer of epithelial cells in which each cell is taller than
it is wide. This membrane is found in the gastrointestinal tract.
d. A pseudostratified membrane is composed of a one-cell layer, but it appears stratified because the
nuclei of adjacent cells are located at different levels. This membrane is found in the respiratory
passages.

4. All connective tissues are characterized by the fact that the cells are not close together, but instead are
separated by an abundant amount of intercellular material (matrix).

5. a. tendons, ligaments
b. dense irregular
c. articular surface of bones, the trachea and bronchi, the nose, and the costal cartilages
d. symphysis pubis and the intervertebral discs

6. striated muscle

7. smooth muscle

8. a. The epithelium of the skin is a stratified squamous keratinized epithelium. This structure grants
protection against abrasion and desiccation. The epithelium of the intestine is a simple columnar
epithelium. This structure permits the rapid absorption of the products of digestion.
b. Cardiac muscle is made of short, branched striated muscle cells interconnected by intercalated discs
and controlled by a single nucleus. Because of this arrangement, all the cells in the cardiac mass
contract as a single unit, allowing the heart to function as an effective pump. In multinucleated skeletal
muscles the individual muscle cells are long, cylindrical, and separate from each other. This permits
some muscle cells to contract while others do not; a graded and controlled muscle contraction can thus
be performed.

9. Connective tissues are characterized by abundant amounts of extracellular material, or matrix. Connective
tissue cells are spread out creating large extracellular spaces that provide room for blood vessels, nerves,
and lymphatic vessels.
There are 5 major types of connective tissues:
1. mesenchyme – an undifferentiated tissue found primarily during embryonic development.
2. connective tissue proper – loose (areolar); dense (tendons/ligaments); elastic; reticular; and adipose.
All of these have a matrix of fibers.
3. cartilage – hyaline (trachea, nose, bone ends); elastic (epiglottis); fibrous (symphysis pubis) All of
these have a gel matrix.
4. bone – osseous; osteocytes in calcium phosphate matrix. Bone as a solid matrix called lamellae.
5. blood – erythrocytes, leukocytes, thrombocytes in a fluid matrix (plasma). Blood has a liquid matrix
called plasma.

10. The muscles of the tongue are striated muscles. This might be expected since people have voluntary control
of their tongue. Similarly, one would expect the muscles of the diaphragm to be skeletal as well since
breathing can be voluntarily influenced. Despite the fact that the diaphragm can be operated subconsciously
by the brainstem, such as while asleep, this muscle is still striated.

11. Blood vessels and nerves are not found between the cells of epithelial membranes becasue there is no room
between epithelial cells that are very closely packed and joined together by junctional complexes (tight
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assaults on his reputation. Missionaries had declared (and perhaps
believed) that he was a satyr who sought to corrupt young innocents.
Consignments of supplies, machinery and what-not else had failed to
reach the destination, or had arrived so smashed as to be useless.
Marmaduke had grinned, continued grinning, and had won, dying with
his boots on six months after Hannah Sanburn was installed in charge,
hoping, as they laid him on a stretcher, that the pigs he had slain for
sausage-meat might have most of the credit; since it was they who made
the mission possible.
His will, in which he appointed a Tibetan Lama chief trustee, had
been a nine days’ wonder, partly because of its novelty, but mostly
because that masterly provision introduced an international element,
which made it next to impossible for politicians to undo the work. Tibet
as a military power can not be taken seriously: but it is noteworthy that
not even “big business” has succeeded in controlling its government or
in penetrating its frontiers. The backing of the Dalai Lama is worth more,
in some contingencies, than a billion dollars and a million armed men.
(There is a European parallel.)
And the Tashi Lama is to the Dalai Lama as is the differential
calculus to the simple rule of three, only if anything rather more so.
[39] India.
[40] Vase-shaped stone monuments of Buddhist origin.

My son, the wise are few; for Wisdom very seldom

pleases, so that they are few who seek her. Wisdom will
compel whoever entertains her to avoid all selfishness
and to escape from praise. But Wisdom seeks them who
are worthy, discovering some here and there,
unstupified and uncorrupted by the slime of cant, with
whom thereafter it is a privilege to other men to tread
the self-same earth, whether or not they know it.
F B S T S .
 CHAPTER XXIV
HANNAH SANBURN.

T is a narrow bridge, swung high above a noisy stream, that

forms the only practicable gate to Tilgaun. On the Tilgaun side is a high
mound that resembles a look-out post, with a big prayer-flag on top that
might be the defiant emblem of an army. The track leads below that
mound, across a hollow, and climbs again toward the mission, more than
a mile away.
As Ommony rode across the bridge behind the leading Tibetan he
was aware of faces peering from the top of the mound beside the prayer-
flag. When he was midway over the bridge the faces disappeared. When
he reached the foot of the mound there were six Bhutani mission girls
standing in a row on the rim of the hollow.
They wore the Marmaduke Mission costume, which is made from
one piece of daffodil-yellow fabric woven on the mission looms. Their
hair was decked with flowers, and they were laughing, that being a part
of old Marmaduke’s legacy, he having had a notion that to laugh with
good reason, is two-thirds of an education. The other third is harder to
acquire, but comes much easier because of laughter; or so said
Marmaduke, who had considered many pigs, that perished.
They were not so poised and self-reliant as the Lama’s dancing girls,
but they looked marvelously better than the common run of Hill women,
and as different from ordinary mission converts as a live trout is from a
dead sardine. At a glance it was obvious that nobody had told them they
were heathen in their blindness; somebody had shown them how to revel
in the sunshine and to wonder at the wine-light of gloaming. It was
conceivable that they had studied nature’s mirth instead of watching
frogs dissected with a scalpel, and had learned to be amused with each
existing minute rather than to meditate on metaphysical conundrums.
But they had their heritage nevertheless. Their eyes were on Dawa
Tsering. It was just as well that there were six of them together.
Dawa Tsering, gasconading on pony-back with his feet within nine
inches of the ground, called two of them by name, inquired about a third
who was not there, and asked whether they had forgotten him.
“I know a good way to remind you who I am!” he boasted, and got
off the pony to act the satyr among wood-nymphs. Ommony checked
him curtly. He protested:
 “I tell you, Ommonee, the gods make free with women and the devils
do the same! It is ridiculous to pretend we are better than gods and
devils. What are women for, do you suppose?”
It was so that they discovered who Ommony was. In that Bhat-
Brahman costume covered by a sheepskin coat and without his beard
they had not recognized him. All six looked at him sharply, hesitated,
glanced at the sky, accepted that as an excuse, and ran, gathering up the
yellow robes and showing copper-colored legs, their long hair streaming
in the wind behind them.
“Why are they afraid of you?” asked Dawa Tsering. “Are you such a
terror among women as all that?”
“It was the rain,” said Ommony. But he knew better. The girls were
giggling.
The sky had clouded over suddenly, and in a moment, on a blast of
icy wind, the rain came down in sheets that cut off the view of the
mission buildings. The ponies turned their rumps to it and stood, heads
down, tails blown tight under. Diana whimpered and took refuge under
the end of the bridge, where Ommony joined her; there was no hope of
getting the ponies to move until the storm passed. It turned to hail and
swept the bridge like concentrated musketry, lightning and terrific,
volleying thunderclaps heightening the illusion.
Twenty minutes later, when the sky cleared as suddenly as it had
clouded and the setting sun shone on drifts of melting hail, Ommony saw
the drenched girls leave the shelter of a rock and scamper for the mission
gate. He did not doubt for one fraction of a moment that they had been
sent by Hannah Sanburn to the bridge-end to keep a look-out for him.
Discontented—it was aggravating to be treated as a potential enemy—he
rode on prepared to see the Lama hurrying away ahead of him.
However, Hannah Sanburn met him in the gate and laughed at his
disguise. He judged she was relieved, not annoyed to see him. There was
all the old friendliness expressed on her New England face. Boston,
Massachusetts—Commonwealth Avenue or Tremont Street—stood out
all over her, even after twenty years of Tilgaun. She was dressed in
tailored serge with a camel-hair overcoat turned up to her ears. A wealth
of chestnut hair, beginning to turn gray, showed under a plain deerstalker
hat. She had not lost one trace of her New England manner—not a
vestige of her pride. No weakness, but a firm and comprehending
kindness dwelt on the almost manly forehead, at the corners of her
mouth and in the grand gray eyes.
 “All alone?” asked Ommony, dismounting, shaking hands. He liked
her laughter; it was wholesome, even if she did look quizzically at his
jaw and chin that she had never seen before without the modifying beard.
“Yes, Cottswold. You’re a day late. Tsiang Samdup left this
morning.”
“Why?” he asked bluntly.
She did not answer but looked straight at Dawa Tsering, nodded,
smiled at his sheepish grin, and walked straight up to him.
“Give me your knife,” she said quietly, and took it from him almost
before he guessed what she intended. He made no effort to prevent, but
sat still on his pony, looking foolish. “You shall have that back if you
behave yourself, not otherwise. If you look twice at one of the mission
girls I will order the blacksmith to break your knife in two. You
understand me?”
She made friends with Diana next, saying hardly a word but lifting
her by the forelegs to see whether the feet were injured by the long
march. The hound accepted her authority as promptly as Dawa Tsering
did.
Stroking Diana’s head with one shapely, rather freckled hand,
ordering the Tibetans to lead the ponies to the stable, she led the way into
the stone-paved courtyard. Cloistered buildings of worn gray stone
formed three sides of it, and in the midst there was an oval mass of
flowers, damaged by the hail but gorgeous in the last rays of the setting
sun.
There was a room reserved for Ommony’s exclusive use, in a corner
facing that front courtyard, and though he had never used it oftener than
once in three years it had always been kept ready for him. Another room,
used less seldom, was reserved for Tsiang Samdup in the corner
opposite.
“Mr. McGregor sent your clothes by messenger. You’ll find them all
unpacked and cared for—lots of hot water—I’m sorry you can’t grow a
beard in fifteen minutes! Come to my room when you’re ready. I’ll take
the dog.”
Ommony shut himself into the room to smoke and think. He dreaded
the coming interview more and more, the longer he postponed it—
realized that what he most detested, in a world full of discordances, was
to have to account for his actions to any one else. “Marriage might be all
right,” he muttered, “if women would govern themselves and concede
men the same privilege.”
He let an hour slip by before he presented himself in Hannah
Sanburn’s private room—a long room over an archway leading to an
inner cloister, bow-windowed on both sides, paneled in teak, with a
blazing fire at one end. The crimson curtains had been drawn; the shaded
oil lamps cast a warm glow over everything; a square table had been
spread near the fire and Hannah Sanburn was making toast, stepping
back and forward cautiously across Diana, who had made herself
thoroughly at home on the hearthrug. Old Montagu’s portrait, life-size,
head and shoulders, smiled at the scene from the end-wall, the flickering
firelight making his shrewd, peculiarly boyish features seem almost
ready to step out of the frame and talk.
It was more difficult than ever to put her to the question in that
atmosphere. She had changed into a semi-evening dress, that aged her a
little but added an old-worldly charm. It would be difficult to imagine a
hostess whom one would less like to offend, and the arrival of bacon and
eggs on a silver tray carried by a seventeen-year-old Bhutani girl
provided welcome excuse for delay.
Hannah Sanburn seemed entirely unembarrassed and, if she noticed
Ommony’s air of having something on his mind, she concealed the fact
perfectly, talking about the events of the mission in a matter-of-fact
voice, relating difficulties she had overcome, outlining plans for the
future, avoiding anything that might lead to personal issues.
“I don’t know how much good we’re doing—sometimes I think
scarcely any,” she said at last. “We rear and educate these girls. The best
ones, of course, stay on for a while as teachers. But they all get married
sooner or later and lapse into the old ways. It will be a century at least
before this school begins to make much visible impression.”
Ommony stared at the fire. “Thank goodness, we’ll be dead then,
with something different to fret about,” he grumbled, angry with the
destiny that he felt compelled him to probe a gentlewoman’s secrets. She
noticed the tone of his voice—could not very well ignore it.
“What is troubling you, Cottswold? I supposed you were the most
contented man on earth. Have you lost your interest in your forest?”
“I’ve resigned from the forestry.” He stared at her, and broke the ice
suddenly, doing the very thing he was determined not to, blurting a blunt
question without tact or even a preliminary warning. “Who is this girl
Elsa, who is never at the mission when I’m here, but who has been to
Lhassa, talks English and Tibetan, and can draw like Michael Angelo?”
He jerked his jaw forward to conceal the contempt that he felt for
himself for having blundered in so clumsily, all the while watching her
face but detecting no nervousness. To his surprise and relief she laughed
and leaned her head against the high chair-back, looking at him
humorously from under lowered eyelids, as she might have listened to a
lame excuse from some one in the school.
“Poor Cottswold! How you must have felt uncomfortable!—you’re
so faithful to your friends. No, Elsa is not my daughter. I have never had
that experience. If she were my daughter I know quite well I would have
said so long ago. I can imagine myself being proud of her, even—even in
those circumstances.”
“I confess I’m mightily relieved,” said Ommony, grinning
uncomfortably. “Not, of course, that I’d have—”
“No, I know you wouldn’t,” she interrupted. “You are the last person
on earth I would hide that kind of secret from.”
“Why any kind of secret, Hannah? Am I not to be trusted?”
“Not in this instance. You’re the one man who couldn’t be told.”
Then, after a dramatic pause: “Elsa is your niece.”
“Niece?” he said, and shut his teeth with a snap. That one word
solved the whole long riddle.
“Her name is Elsa Terry.”
He did not speak. He leaned forward, staring at her under knitted
brows, his eyes as eloquent as the silence that lasted while the Bhutani
girl came in and removed the supper table. Even after the girl had gone,
for two or three minutes the only sounds were the solemn ticking of a big
clock on the mantelpiece, the cracking of a pine-knot in the fire, and a
murmur of song from a building fifty yards away.
“You and almost everybody else have always believed Jack Terry and
your sister Elsa vanished twenty years ago without trace,” she said at
last. “They didn’t.”
“Didn’t they go to the Ahbor country?”
“Yes.”
“You mean they’re alive and you’ve known it all these years?”
“They have been dead nearly twenty years. I learned about it soon
afterward. You know now why they went up there?”
 “I’ve no new information. Jack Terry was as mad as a March hare—”
“I think not,” Hannah Sanburn answered, her gray eyes staring at the
fire. “Jack Terry was the most unselfish man I ever heard of. He adored
your sister. She was a spiritual, other-worldly little woman, and that
beast Kananda Pal—”
“I blame Jenkins,” said Ommony, grinding his teeth. “Kananda Pal
was born into a black-art family and knew no better. Jenkins—”
“Never mind him now. Jack Terry did his best. Your sister Elsa used
to have lapses; she would cry for days on end and write letters to Mr.
Jenkins begging him to give back the mind he had stolen from her. No,
she wasn’t mad; it was obsession. I did my best, but I hadn’t much
experience in those days and she was difficult to understand; the phases
of the moon seemed to have something to do with it; Jack Terry and I
were agreed about that. You’ve met Sirdar Sirohe Singh of Tilgaun?”
Ommony nodded.
“He has always been a friend. He appears to be a mystic. He knows
things that other people don’t know, and hardly ever talks of them. Jack
Terry learned from him—Jack set his arm, or a collar-bone, I forget
which—anyway he told Jack about the Crystal Jade of Ahbor.”
Ommony’s lips moved in the suggestion of a whistle and Diana
opened one eye.
“All the people hereabouts seem to have heard of the jade,” Hannah
Sanburn went on, “but the sirdar seems to be the only one who really
knows anything about it. All I know is that I have had a piece of it in my
hands in this house. It nearly drove me frantic to look into it, so I locked
it away in that cupboard over there. It was stolen by a girl I should never
have trusted, and I’m nearly but not quite sure it was the sirdar who
bribed her to steal it from me. She was murdered, apparently while on
the way to the sirdar’s house a few miles from here. Tsiang Samdup was
here last night and showed me the piece of jade; he said he had recovered
it in Delhi.”
“What else did he say?” asked Ommony, but she ignored the
question, continuing to stare into the fire, as if she could see in it pictures
of twenty years ago.
“Jack Terry told me,” she went on presently, “that he believed the
Crystal Jade of Ahbor had magic properties. You know how he believed
in magic, and how he always insisted that magic is merely science that
hasn’t been recognized yet by the schools. He said mineral springs can
heal the body, so there was no reason why there shouldn’t be a stone
somewhere, possessed of properties that can heal the mind in certain
conditions. I didn’t agree with him. It seemed to me utter nonsense,
although—I’m less inclined than I was then to say things can’t be simply
because we have been taught the contrary. I have held a piece of the Jade
of Ahbor in my hands and—well, I don’t know, and that’s all about it.”
She paused again, perfectly still. Ommony got up, heaped wood on
the fire, and sat down again. The cracking pine-knots and the ascending
sparks broke her reverie.
“It was no use talking to Jack Terry,” she continued, “and your sister
would have gone to the North Pole with him, or anywhere else, if he had
as much as proposed it. The two set off like Launcelot and Elaine into
the unknown. You know, the very heart of the Ahbor Valley isn’t more
than fifty miles from here, although they say nobody has ever gone there
and returned alive. Jack Terry—you remember how he always laughed at
the impossible—said they would probably be gone not more than three
or four weeks. They took scarcely any supplies with them—just a tent
and bedding—half a dozen ponies—two servants. The servants deserted
the third night out and were killed by Bhutani robbers.”
“Yes,” said Ommony. “That was all I could ever find out, and that
cost a month’s investigation.”
“I knew the whole story two or three weeks before you got
permission to leave your forest and come to investigate; I wasn’t allowed
to tell.”
“Weren’t allowed. Who in thunder—”
“Tsiang Samdup came down from the Ahbor Valley and in this room,
sitting on that hearthrug where the dog lies now, told me the story. I
remember how he began—his exact words:
“ ‘My daughter, there is danger in another’s duty. There is also duty
in another’s danger. There is merit in considered speech, but strength
consists in silence. Truth, that may be told to one, may lead to evil if
repeated. I am minded to speak to your ears only.’
“Offhand I told him I would of course respect his confidence, but he
sat still for about half an hour before he spoke again. Then he took at
least half an hour to commit me to a pledge of secrecy that I could not
possibly break without losing my own self-respect. I discovered before
he was through that he had been quite right to do that, but I confess there
were moments that evening when it looked as if he had trapped me into
something against which every moral fiber in me rebelled instinctively.
For an hour I hated him. And there have been times—many times since
—when it has been extremely difficult to keep the promise. However, I
have kept it. It was only yesterday that he gave me leave to tell you as
much as I know.”
“He might have confided in me in the first place,” said Ommony, but
Hannah Sanburn shook her head.
“I did suggest that to him. I urged it. But he made me see that he was
quite right not to. It would have placed you in an impossible position.
What had happened was this: the Terrys did succeed in entering the
Ahbor Valley. They seemed to have undergone frightful hardships, and
nobody knows how they found the way, but they did. They were hunted
like animals, and when Tsiang Samdup rescued them Jack Terry was
dying from wounds, hunger and exposure; he had managed somehow to
find enough food for his wife, and he had persuaded her to eat, and to let
him go without.”
“Are you sure of your information?” Ommony asked. “That doesn’t
sound like Elsa.”
“There was a baby coming.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Tsiang Samdup took them to his monastery, which is somewhere in
the Ahbor Valley. The only way he was able to protect them from the
Ahbors, who have never allowed strangers in the Valley and vow they
never will, was by prophesying that the baby shortly to be born would be
a reincarnation of an ancient Chinese saint, named San-fun-ho. There
was no hope of saving Jack Terry, but Tsiang Samdup hoped to save the
mother’s life. However, she died giving birth to the child, and Jack Terry
followed her the same night.”
“Did they leave anything in writing?”
“I have letters I’ll show you presently, written and signed by both of
them, in which they speak of the Lama Tsiang Samdup as having risked
his own life to save theirs. Jack Terry wrote that he was dying of wounds
and exposure. The Lama gave me both letters after he had told the story.
But I would have believed him without that. I have always believed
every word that Tsiang Samdup said, even while I hated him for having
pledged me to silence.”
“Go ahead. I mistrusted him not long ago—and changed my mind.”
“Tsiang Samdup is not to be doubted, Cottswold. He lied to Ahbors,
but that was to save life. It was an inspiration—the only way out of it—
to tell those savages that the unborn baby was to be a reincarnation of a
Chinese saint. I admire him for the lie. Imagine, if you can, old Tsiang
Samdup—for he was old even then—rearing and weaning that baby in a
monastery in the midst of savages. The Terrys’ death seems to have
made it easier in one way: the natives saw them buried, which satisfied
their law against admitting strangers, and Tsiang Samdup prevented them
from digging up the bodies to throw them in the river, by casting a halo
of sainthood over them on the ground that they had brought a saint into
the world. You know how all this country to the north of us believes
implicitly in reincarnations of saints—the Tashi Lama is supposed to be
the reincarnation of his predecessor; and so on. Do you see how Tsiang
Samdup became more and more committed?”
There was a long silence. Ommony poked the fire restlessly. A native
teacher came in, offered a report for signature, and went out. Hannah
Sanburn went on with her story:
“He had promised those savages a baby saint. He had produced the
baby. Now he had to educate the saint, and its being a girl made it all the
more difficult. But it seems there are people to whom Tsiang Samdup
can go for advice. I don’t know who they are, or where they are; he
mentions them rarely, and very guardedly; I think he has referred to them
twice, or perhaps three times during all the years I have known him, and
then only for the purpose of suggesting that he isn’t exactly a free agent.
The conclusion I drew from his guarded hints was, that he acts, and is
responsible for what he does, but that he would lose the privilege of
conference with these unknown individuals if he should allow personal
considerations to govern him. At that, I’m only guessing. He said
nothing definite.”
“The Masters!” said Ommony, nodding. “I’ll bet you he knows some
of the Masters!” But if Hannah Sanburn knew who they were she gave
no sign. She went on talking:
“It seems that the Ahbors trust him implicitly within certain limits.
They would kill him and burn his monastery if they caught him
practising the least deception; and they watched that baby day and night.
The wife of an Ahbor chieftain became the wet-nurse, and the child
throve, but it very soon dawned on Tsiang Samdup that however
carefully he might educate her—(you knew he had an Oxford
education?)—she would grow up like a half-breed, unless he could have
skilful assistance from some one of her own race. So he consulted these
mysterious authorities, and ‘they,’ whoever they are, told him that a way
would open up if he should take me into confidence.
“As I told you, he first bound me to secrecy. He didn’t make me
swear, but he gave me a lecture on keeping faith, that was as radical as
the Sermon on the Mount, and he tested me every inch of the way to
make sure I agreed with him. I have used that sermon over and over
again in teaching the teachers of this school.
“When he had me so tied up in my own explanations of what keeping
faith really means, that there wasn’t any possible way out for me, he told
me the story I have just told you, and made me an astonishing proposal. I
have sometimes wished I had accepted it.”
Hannah Sanburn paused for a long time, staring at the fire.
“He offered,” she said at last, “to find some one else for my position
here; to smuggle me into the Ahbor Valley; and to teach me more
knowledge than Solomon knew—if I would give unqualified consent,
and would agree to stay up there and help him educate that baby.”
“And—?”
“And I refused,” she said quietly. “Won’t you put some more wood
on the fire?”

And this I know: that when the gods have use for us
they blindfold us, because if we should see and
comprehend the outcome we should grow so vain that
not even the gods could preserve us from destruction.
Vanity, self-righteousness and sin, these three are
one, whose complements are meekness, self-will and
indifference.
Meekness is not modesty. Meekness is an insult to
the Soul. But out of modesty comes wisdom, because in
modesty the gods can find expression.
The wise gods do not corrupt modesty with wealth or
fame, but its reward is in well-doing and in a satisfying
inner vision.
F B S T S .
 CHAPTER XXV
THE COMPROMISE

O stacked up the fire and resumed his seat in the leather

armchair that Marmaduke had always used. Diana, belly to the blaze,
barked and galloped in her sleep. Hannah Sanburn went on talking:
“Tsiang Samdup said last night that you have been with him two
months. Do you know then what I mean when I say one can’t argue with
him? He just sat there on the hearthrug and—it’s difficult to explain—he
seemed to be listening for an inside message. It may sound idiotic, but I
received the impression of a man waiting for his own soul to talk to him.
He was perfectly silent. He hardly breathed. I felt absolutely sure he
would find some way out of the difficulty. But the strange thing was, that
the solution came from me. I suppose ten minutes passed without a word
said, and I felt all the while as if my mind were being freed from weights
that I had never known were there. Then suddenly I spoke because I
couldn’t help it; I saw what to do so clearly that I simply had to tell him.
“It wasn’t hypnotism. It was just the contrary. It was as if he had
dehypnotized me. I saw all the risks and scores of difficulties. And I saw
absolutely clearly the necessity of doing just one thing. I told him I
would take the child for six months out of every year and treat her as if
she were my own. He might have her for the other six months. Every
single wrinkle on his dear old face smiled separately when I said that. I
had hardly said it when I began to wish I hadn’t; but he held me to my
word.
“He brought me the baby the following week, and she was here in
this building all the while you were ranging the hills for some word of
the Terrys. The hardest work I ever had to do was to keep silent when
you returned here worn out and miserable about your sister’s fate. But, if
you had been let into the secret, you would have interfered—wouldn’t
you? Am I right or wrong, Cottswold?”
“Of course. I would never have dreamed of letting my sister’s child
go back to the Ahbor Valley.”
“Yet, if Tsiang Samdup hadn’t taken her every year for half a year,
the Ahbors would have killed him. And remember: I had bound myself
in advance not to tell any one—and particularly not to tell you. The
Lama was only able to loan her to me for six months of every year by
consenting to the Ahbors watching her all the time she was with me.
Whenever she has been with me Ahbors have watched day and night.
The excuse Tsiang Samdup gave to them was that unless she should be
with me for long periods she would die and the Ahbors would find their
valley invaded by white armies in consequence. They fear invasion of
their valley more than anything else they can imagine. On the other hand,
they regard the child as a gift from Heaven and the old Lama as her
rightful guardian.
“I don’t quite understand the situation up there; the Ahbors don’t
accept Tsiang Samdup’s teachings, they have a religion of their own; and
he isn’t one of them; he’s a Tibetan. But they recognize him as a Lama,
protect his monastery, and submit to his authority in certain ways.
Perhaps I’m stupid; he has tried very hard to explain, and so has Elsa.
Privately I called her Elsa, after her mother, of course. Tsiang Samdup
gave her the Chinese name of San-fun-ho. The word is supposed to
signify every possible human virtue.”
“Who called her Samding?” Ommony asked bluntly.
Hannah Sanburn stared. “You know then? This isn’t news? I
remember now: Tsiang Samdup said last night: ‘That of which a man is
ignorant may well be kept from him, but that which he knows should be
explained, lest he confuse it with what he does not know.’ ”
“I’m putting two and two together,” Ommony answered. “I leaned
over a monastery gallery in Darjiling. The chela was straight underneath
me. A beam of sunlight showed a girl’s breasts. Am I right? Are San-
fun-ho, Samding the chela and my sister’s child Elsa one and the same
person?”
“Yes. I wonder you never recognized your sister’s voice—that almost
baritone boyish resonance. You didn’t?”
“Who are those other girls?”
“Companions for her! Don’t rush me. Wait while I explain. Elsa
developed into the most marvelous child I have ever known. It was
partly Tsiang Samdup’s influence; he gave up his whole life to training
her; and he’s wise—I can never begin to tell you how wise he is. But it
was partly due to her heredity. You see, she had your sister’s spiritual
qualities, and something of Jack Terry’s gay indifference to all the usual
human pros and cons—the courage of both of them—and something else
added, entirely her own. I wish she were my child! Oh, how I wish it!
And yet, d’you know, Cottswold, down in my heart I’m glad she isn’t,
simply because, if she were mine, she would have missed so much!”
 Hannah Sanburn stared into the fire again, silent until Ommony grew
restless.
“There’s so much to tell!” she said at last. “I knew from the first, and
Tsiang Samdup soon discovered that the odds would be all against her
unless she could have white children of her own age for companions.
When he came and spoke of that I tried to persuade him to let me send
her to America; but at the very suggestion he looked so old and grieved
and disappointed that I felt it would kill him to lose her. I suggested that
he should go with her, but he said no, he had a duty to the Ahbors. I
thought then he was afraid the Ahbors would torture him to death and
burn his monastery if he should let her go; but he read my thoughts and
assured me that consideration had no weight. I believed him. I believe he
is perfectly indifferent to pain and death. He sat still for a long time, and
then said:
“ ‘It is better not to begin, than to begin and not go through to a
conclusion. Then we should only have deprived ourselves of opportunity.
Now we should rob the child.’
“He asked me to obtain white children for companions for her. I
refused, of course, at once to have anything to do with it. We quarreled
bitterly—or rather, I did. He sat quite still, and when I had finished
scolding him he went away in silence. I did not see him again for several
months, and he never told me how he obtained white children. I can’t
imagine how he did it without raising a scandal all over the world. I have
been in agonies over it, for fear this mission would suffer. You know, if
word once got around that we were importing white children into the
Ahbor Valley, no proof of innocence would ever quiet the suspicion. Just
think what a chance the Christian missionaries would have for destroying
our good name! Can you imagine them sparing us?”
Ommony grinned and nodded. As trustees of a Buddhist mission to
the Buddhists, he had tasted his share of that zealotry.
“He obtained the children through the agency of a Jew named
Benjamin,” he said. “They were all orphans. They were saved from God
knows what. Go on.”
“I have only seen the other children rarely. Now and then they would
come here in twos and threes, and I used to question them, but they all
seemed too happy to remember their past, and they only had the vaguest
notions as to how they ever reached the Ahbor Valley. The general plan
was for me to do my best with Elsa during the six months of the year she
was with me, and for her to teach them. Tsiang Samdup said it would be
good for her to have to teach them—that she would learn more in that
way than any other; and as usual he was entirely right.
“To help the other girls he made them pass their teaching on to
Tibetan children. But he hasn’t had quite the success with the others that
he has had with Elsa; they hadn’t her character to begin with. He never
punishes. Have you any idea what patience it calls for to educate
growing children without ever inflicting punishment of any kind—what
patience and skill?”
Ommony glanced at Diana. “It’s the only way. I never punish,” he
said quietly. “Go on.”
“My own share in Elsa’s education has been very slight indeed,”
Hannah Sanburn went on. “I had to teach her Western conventions as to
table manners and so on, and to explain to her what sort of subjects are
taboo in what we call civilized society. I have taught her to wear frocks
properly, have corrected her English pronunciation and have given her
music lessons. I can’t think of anything else. The real education has been
all the other way; it is I who have learned—oh, simply countless things
—by observing her. She never argues. You can’t persuade her to tell
more than a fraction of what she knows. She is afraid of nothing and of
nobody. And she is as full of fun as the veriest young pagan that ever
lived.”
“Is she affectionate?” asked Ommony.
“Intensely. But not demonstrative. I should say she loves enormously,
but without the slightest jealousy or passion. She has learned Tsiang
Samdup’s faculty of divining people’s weakness, and of playing up to
their strength instead of taking advantage of the weakness or letting it
annoy her. The result, of course, is that she is instantly popular wherever
she goes.”
“How in the world have you kept these mission girls from talking
about her?” asked Ommony.
“That was quite easy. They adore her. She is their special secret; and
they quite understand that if they talk about her outside the mission she
will stay away. Besides, the mission girls don’t have much opportunity to
talk with outsiders, and those to whom they do talk are superstitious
people, who speak with bated breath of San-fun-ho of Ahbor. There have
been much harder problems than that.”
Hannah Sanburn stared into the fire again. It appeared there were
painful memories.
 “You see, there have been European visitors at times. Some of them
came unannounced, and sometimes Elsa was here when they came.
There were times when I could pass her off as a teacher, but sometimes
she was discovered in boy’s clothes, which made that impossible; and
whether she was dressed as a boy or girl she aroused such intense
curiosity that questions became pointed and very difficult to answer. I
have dozens of letters, Cottswold, from friends in Massachusetts asking
whether it is true, as they learn from missionary correspondents, that I
have a child. Some ask why I kept my marriage secret. Some insinuate
that they are too broad-minded to hold a lapse from virtue against me, as
long as I don’t come home and make it awkward for them. Others preach
me a sermon on hypocrisy. Quite a number of my friends have dropped
me altogether. I suppose the strict provisions of the penal code have kept
people from libeling me in India, but that has not prevented them from
writing scandal to their friends abroad.”
“What was the idea of boy’s clothes?”
“Education. Tsiang Samdup insists she must know everything he
possibly can teach her. She has been to Lhassa, far into China, and down
into India. He could not have taken her to some of those places unless
she were disguised as his chela; a girl chela would have aroused all sorts
of scandal and difficulties. Then again, he says all human life is drama
and the only way to teach is by dramatic presentation; but who, he asks,
can present a drama unless able to act all parts in it? He says we can only
learn by teaching, and can only teach by learning; and he is right,
Cottswold, he is absolutely right.”
“Does he propose that she shall preach a crusade or something like
that in India?” Ommony asked, frowning.
“He proposes she shall be an absolutely free agent, possessed of all
knowledge necessary to freedom. That tour into India was only a part of
her education.”
“But I saw her as Samding receiving princes of the blood and being
almost worshiped,” Ommony objected.
“Education. Tsiang Samdup says she will be either flattered or hated
wherever she goes. He says the hatred will strengthen her. He wants to
be sure no flattery shall turn her head.”
“And those other girls?”
“They are to go free also, as and when she goes. Tsiang Samdup is
fabulously rich. He pays for everything in gold, although I don’t know
where he gets it. He has secret agents all over India—sometimes I think
they’re all over the world. He says wherever Elsa goes, she and the other
girls will be provided for and will find friends.”
“Where does he propose to send them?” Ommony asked, a wave of
rebellion sweeping over him. He was well schooled in self-control, but
all the English in him rose against the notion of his sister’s child being
subject to an Oriental’s whim. Education was one thing: heritage another.
Hannah Sanburn laughed. The expression of her face was firm, and
yet peculiarly helpless.
“I am not to tell you that.”
“Why in thunder not? You have told so much, that—”
“If you were as used as I am, Cottswold, to trusting that grand old
Lama, and always discovering afterward that his advice was good, you
wouldn’t press the point.”
“My sister’s child—” he began angrily; but she interrupted him.
“Don’t forget: Tsiang Samdup saved the mother from death at the
hands of savages. It is thanks to him, and to nobody but him, that the
baby was born alive.”
“Yes, but—”
“Tsiang Samdup told me, and I believe him, that your sister put the
new-born baby into his arms and begged him to care for it as if it were
his own. She gave him the baby with her dying breath.”
“What else could she do?” asked Ommony. “Poor girl, she was—”
“Yes. But she did it,” said Hannah Sanburn. “Can you name one
instance in which Tsiang Samdup has failed to keep trust to the limit of
his power?”
There followed a long silence, broken only by the faint murmur of
singing in a hall across the rear courtyard, the falling of burned wood on
the hearth, and the muttered barking of Diana chasing something in her
dreams. It endured until Diana awoke suddenly, sat up and growled.
There came a man’s voice from the front courtyard. Two or three
minutes later there was a knock at the door and a toothless old Sikhimese
watchman announced a visitor, mumbling so that Ommony did not catch
the name. A moment later Sirdar Sirohe Singh strode into the room,
greeted by thundering explosions from Diana, who presently recognized
him and lay down again.
The sirdar without speaking bowed profoundly, once to Hannah
Sanburn, once to Ommony, then crossed the room and sat down cross-
legged on the floor, with his back to a corner of the fireplace at Hannah
Sanburn’s right hand, where his own face was in shadow but he could
see both hers and Ommony’s. Diana went up and sniffed him but he took
no notice of her.
“I have word,” he said gruffly, at the end of three or four minutes’
silence.
He seemed to expect comment.
“From whom? About what?”
The sirdar’s amber eyes met Ommony’s. “You remember? When we
met the first time I said I was at your disposal to escort you to another
place.”
Ommony nodded.
“But I am not your superior.” (The sirdar used a word that conveys
more the relationship of a guru to his chela than can be expressed by one
word in English; but at that, the significance was vague.) “Do you wish
to come with me?”
In the West it would have been the part of wisdom to ask when, why,
whither? Twenty and odd years of India had given Ommony an insight
into arguments not current in the West, however. He did not even glance
at Hannah Sanburn.
“Yes.”
“I am ready.”
The sirdar stood up. There was magic in the air. Diana sensed it; she
was trembling. Hannah Sanburn rose and placed herself between the
sirdar and the fire, so that he could not pass her easily.
“Do you accept responsibility?” she asked.
The sirdar nodded.
“Will he return here?”
“As to that I am ignorant. He will arrive there.”
“You will escort him safely to the Lama?”
Again the sirdar nodded.
Hannah Sanburn moved and the sirdar strode past her toward the
door. Ommony started to follow him, but turned, walked deliberately up
to Hannah Sanburn and kissed her, hardly knowing why, except that he
admired her and possibly might never see her again. She seemed to
understand.
“Good-by,” she said quietly. “If you reach the Ahbor Valley you’ll be
safe enough—only do what he tells you.” Then, divining his intention:
“No, take the dog. I would like her, but you may need her. The Lama
said so. Good-by.”
It was cold outside. Ommony tied on Diana’s sheepskin jacket, which
was hanging, cleaned and dried, from a peg in the hall. Below in the
courtyard the sirdar turned and said abruptly:
“To your own room first.”
It was like being led out to be shot. In the gloom in the corner near
Ommony’s door a brown-robed Tibetan waited, carrying something on
his arm; Ommony seized Diana’s collar to keep her from flying at him.
He and the sirdar followed Ommony into the room and waited while he
lit the candles; then the sirdar struck a match and lit the overhead oil
lamp.
“Where is Dawa Tsering?” Ommony asked suddenly.
The sirdar smiled, showing wonderfully even teeth that suggested
not exactly cruelty, but the sort of familiarity with unavoidable
unpleasantness that surgeons learn.
“He will come with us part of the way,” he said in a dead-level tone
of voice.
Ommony bridled at that. It touched his own sense of responsibility.
“The man is my servant. What do you propose to do to him?”
“I am not his master.”
“You said ‘part of the way.’ What do you mean by that?”
“Wait and see,” said the sirdar.
“No,” Ommony answered. “I will lead no man into a trap. What do
you intend?”
The sirdar spoke in undertones to the Tibetan, who tossed a bundle
of garments on the bed and left the room.
“You might save time,” the sirdar suggested, pointing to the bundle
on the bed. His manner was polite, and more mysterious than
commanding; he undid the bundle himself and spread out a Tibetan
costume.
“How about you?” asked Ommony, beginning to undress.
“I go as I am.”
Ommony put on the warm Tibetan clothes and examined himself in
the mirror—laughed—remarked that he looked like a monk whose
asceticism consisted in at least three meals a day. But he looked better
when he pulled on a cloth cap and threw a dark shawl over it. The sirdar,
walking around him, viewing him carefully from every angle, appeared
satisfied.
Then Dawa Tsering came, unaccompanied by the Tibetan, standing
burly and enormous in his yak-hair cloak, almost filling up the doorway.
“Thou!” he said, grinning as his eyes met Ommony’s. “Say to
Missish-Anbun she should return my knife to me. We go where there
might be happenings.”
“Where do you suppose we are going?” Ommony asked.
“To that old Lama’s roost, I take it. Between you and me, Ommonee,
I am glad to go anywhere, so be I get away from this place. My wife is in
Tilgaun and has sent two of her husbands to catch me and bring me to
her!”
The sirdar grinned, watching Ommony’s face. “They practise
polyandry in these hills,” he remarked.
That was no news, although there was less of it around Tilgaun since
the Marmaduke influence had begun to make itself felt.
“Seven husbands are enough for her,” said Dawa Tsering. “I grew
weary of planting her corn-fields and being beaten for my trouble. I am
for Spiti, where a man can have as many wives as he can manage and
they fear him! Let us be off before that she-wolf’s husbands catch the
two of us, thou!”
Ommony nodded. The sirdar put the lights out and led the way to the
outer gate, Dawa Tsering following, complaining bitterly about his knife.
“I am ashamed, Ommonee—I am ashamed to go back to Spiti
without my belly-ripper! Where shall I find such another as that? Get it
for me! I would pay its weight in gold for it—if I had that much gold,”
he added sotto voce.
Once outside the gate, though, he was much too eager to be going to
fret about anything else. The whites of his eyes showed alert in the
darkness. There were two ponies; he held Ommony’s, urging him to
mount in haste, then ran behind, slapping the pony’s rump, pursuing the
sirdar’s beast, that cantered with a Tibetan clinging to its tail. Diana
circled around and around the party, barking.
“Thou! Command thy she-dog!” Dawa Tsering panted. “We go
through the village—she will awake my wife’s husbands—command her
to be still, or we are lost!”
Oh, I went where the Gods are, and I have seen the Dawn
Where Beauty and the Muses and the Seven Reasons dwell,
And I saw Hope accoutered with a lantern and a horn
Whose clarion and rays reach the inner rings of hell.
Oh, I was in the storehouse of the jewels of the dew
And the laughter of the motion of the wind-blown grass,
The mystery of morning and its music, and the hue
Of the petals of the roses when the rain-clouds pass.
And so I know who Hope is and why she never sleeps,
And seven of the secrets that are jewels on her breast;
I stood within the silence of the Garden that she keeps,
Where flowers fill the footprints that her sandals pressed;
And I know the springs of laughter, for I trod the Middle
Way,
Where sympathies are sign-posts and the merry Gods the
Guides;
I have been where Hope is Ruler and evolving realms obey;
I know the Secret Nearness where the Ancient Wisdom hides.
 CHAPTER XXVI
AHBOR VALLEY GATE.

T cantered down the village street and over an echoing plank-

bridge beneath which starlit water growled over a gravel bed. Only a rare
light or two shone through the chinks of shuttered windows. Village dogs
yelped at Diana’s heels, but fled when she turned on them. The sirdar
never glanced backward but rode like a shadow, bolt-upright, vanishing,
vanishing, for ever vanishing into the darkness, yet never more than half
a dozen ponies’ lengths ahead. The sound of his pony’s feet was all that
made a human being of him; otherwise he was a specter.
The track rose sharply after they crossed the bridge and the ponies
slowed to a walk, the sirdar maintaining the lead. Dawa Tsering, utterly
winded, sat down on a rock, swaying his body back and forward to ease
the stitch in his side. Ommony drew rein to wait for him, peering over a
cliff-side into hollow darkness filled with the booming of water among
rocks two hundred feet below. The sirdar shouted from around a bend a
little higher up the trail, and stones fell into the track as if his voice had
loosed an avalanche.
A dark figure shrouded in black cloth slid down following the stones
and, before Ommony could move, had jumped to his rein. A young
woman’s face peered up at him, flashing white teeth, but the smile
vanished instantly.
“Dawa Tsering,” she muttered, and then began talking so fast that
Ommony could hardly understand her. Dawa Tsering was in danger; that
seemed clear enough. Also, she, her own self, wanted him, desired him
desperately. She had a baby wrapped in a shawl slung over her shoulder
and had laid another bundle on the ground.
Ommony pointed down the track, and as he moved his arm two men
leaped out of a shadow and rushed up-hill at Dawa Tsering. Diana flew
at them and they backed away. They had weapons, but appeared afraid to
use them. Dawa Tsering ran up-hill toward Ommony, feeling for the
knife that was not there, and Ommony whistled to Diana. The two men
followed her cautiously, advancing step by step as she retreated, snarling.
From the opposite direction around the bend, the sirdar came cantering
back down-hill, sending stones scattering over the cliff-side. The girl
flung herself at Dawa Tsering, seizing him around the neck and pouring
out a stream of words, half-intelligible, choked with anger, grief,
laughter, command, and emotions unknown to those who have not loved
and do not still love an adventurer from Spiti.
“Sooner than expected!” the sirdar grunted, drawing rein.
The sirdar seemed pleased, and to have changed his mind about
being in a hurry. He sat bolt-upright on his pony and waited in silence for
something to happen; but the Tibetan behind him drew a long knife and
showed it to the two men who were standing in the attitude of wrestlers.
Dawa Tsering seemed to want to run, but the woman clung to him. Diana
growled thunderously but awaited orders.
“Who are these men?” asked Ommony.
“My wife’s husbands!” Dawa Tsering shook the girl off and stepped
between Ommony and the sirdar. It appeared he meant to slip away, but
the sirdar’s pony made a sudden half-turn, and there was nothing left for
him but to stand or jump over the cliff. “Protect me, Ommonee! I have
been a friend to you. That dog hasn’t a flea on her. Moreover, Missish-
Anbun has my knife.”
“Who is this young woman?” Ommony demanded.
The sirdar answered. The two husbands were about to speak, but
waited, open-mouthed. The woman was watching the sirdar as if destiny
hung on the movement of his lips.
“She is his. It is his child. Choose!” he commanded, shoving Dawa
Tsering, making him turn to face him. “Go with her to Spiti, or go with
them to Ladak and the wife of many husbands. Which?”
“But how do I know it is my child?” Dawa Tsering grumbled.
The sirdar’s face was in darkness from the shadow of the
overhanging cliff. He did not laugh, but his smile was almost audible.
“She knows. You may learn from her. Choose quickly!”
“Is it a man child?” Dawa Tsering asked; and the woman burst into
excited speech, beginning to unwrap the bundle that swung at her back.
“Well, that is different,” said Dawa Tsering. “If it is a man child—
there is need of men in Spiti. Very well, I will take the woman.”
“To Spiti!” the sirdar commanded. “Understand: I will write to the
Rajah of Spiti. You will stay in Spiti and obey him. If you ever again
cross the boundaries of Spiti without a letter from your rajah giving
permission and stating the reason for it, you will deal with me!”
“Oh, well!” said Dawa Tsering, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Must
I go now?”
“Now!” said the sirdar.
 “Good-by, Ommonee. Now you must pick your own fleas off the
dog. I will be sorry for you when I think of you without a servant, but I
am too well born to be any man’s servant for long, and this woman is a
good one. I will sing songs of you in Spiti after you are dead. I think you
will die soon. Look out for that sirdar; he is a tricky fellow.”
He kicked the bundle the woman had dropped, as a signal for her to
pick it up and follow him. In another moment he had vanished,
clambering by a goat-track up the cliff, humming cheerfully through his
nose each time he paused to let the laden woman overtake him.
The sirdar faced the discontented husbands, lifting his right hand for
silence.
“Go back to that woman in Ladak,[41] and to her say this from me,” he
ordered. “That it may be I will come to Ladak. If I come, and when I
come, it will be well for her if I have no reason to concern myself about
her. Turn neither to the right nor to the left, nor delay on the road to
Ladak, but hasten and tell her my message. And when she has beaten
you, tell her a second time, and add this: that if again she sends men
across the boundaries of Ladak, she shall lose them! Go!”
They went, retreating backward down-hill toward Tilgaun, whence
another track led over a seventeen-thousand foot pass toward their
polyandrous neighborhood. The Tibetan followed them, presumably to
see the order was obeyed. The sirdar turned and rode up-hill in silence,
keeping the middle of the track so that Ommony had no room to draw
alongside. On the left a cliff fell sheer into the darkness; on the right it
rose until it seemed to disappear among the stars.
Ommony rode with his woolen clothes wrapped closely against the
penetrating wind that moaned from over the ravine on his left-hand.
Mystified by the sirdar’s confidently used authority, that could not
possibly have been vested in him by the British or by any other
government (for it seemed to extend into several states), his sensations
began to be mixed and bewildering.
Suggestions of fear are assertive on a dark night, riding into the
unknown, without a weapon; and the sirdar’s mysterious silence was not
reassuring. Hannah Sanburn had said he was “always a friend”; but a
woman all alone in charge of a mission, surrounded by potential danger,
would be likely to overestimate the friendship of any one who was not
openly hostile.
It occurred, and kept on recurring, however hard he tried to dismiss
the thought, that, with the exception of Hannah Sanburn, he alone knew
the secret about Elsa Terry—he and probably that sirdar just ahead of
him; and the sirdar might be one of those dark fanatics whom jealousy
makes murderers. What if the sirdar were leading him now to his death
in the unknown?
For what purpose had Elsa been educated? Why had she been taken
into India on that weird dramatic venture? Why had she been to Lhassa,
the “forbidden city?” Who were the men to whom Hannah Sanburn said
the Lama went for advice? Mahatmas? Masters? Or something else?
What was their purpose? The Lama might easily be a saint and yet their
tool—an unworldly old altruist in the hands of men who had designs on
India; as pliable in their hands as the girl appeared to be pliable in his.
That journey into India might have been a trial venture to discover how
far the girl’s trained personality could be counted on to turn men’s (and
women’s) heads. Gandhi in jail, all India was ripe and waiting for a new
political mahatma.
Why, if not to spy on Ommony, had the Lama tolerated Dawa
Tsering in his company? Dawa Tsering’s suspiciously prompt obedience
to the sirdar rather looked as if the whole thing had been prearranged. In
fact, it certainly was prearranged; the sirdar had admitted he expected
something of the sort. And Ommony remembered now that back in Delhi
Dawa Tsering had been remarkably complaisant about transferring
allegiance from the Lama to himself.
Then—the Ahbor Valley. Was it likely that the sirdar could be
leading him into that forbidden country for any other purpose than to
make sure of his death or possibly to keep him prisoner up there? No
white man, no government agent, not even one trained Nepalese spy who
had penetrated the Ahbor Valley had ever returned alive. The only one
who ever did return had floated, dead and mangled, down the
Brahmaputra River. Thirty-five miles—not a yard more—from the
boundary of Sikhim; perhaps thirty miles from where they were that
minute, the Upper Ahbor Valley was as unknown as the mountains of the
moon. Why should he suppose that he was to be specially favored with
permission to go in there and return alive?
But there was no turning back now—nothing, of course, to prevent
but nothing further from intention. Afraid, yes. Faint-hearted, no. The
two emotions are as the poles apart. Fear acted as a spur to obstinacy, the
unknown as a lure that beckoned more compellingly than safety;
habitually, since his school-days, personal safety had been Ommony’s
last, least consideration. He told himself it was the cold wind that made
the goose-flesh rise, and all that night, shivering, he forced himself to
believe that was the truth, following the sirdar’s pony along trails like a
winding devil’s stairway that led alternately toward the sky and down
again into a roaring underworld.
It was pitch-dark, but the deepest darkness lay ahead, where the
enormous range of the Himalayas was a wall of silence ridged with faint
silver where the starlight shone on everlasting snow. Darkness may be a
substance for all that anybody knows about it; it lay thick and somber,
swallowing the sounds—sudden, crashing sounds, that volleyed and
were gone. A tree fell into a watercourse. A rock went cannoning from
crag to crag and plunged into an abyss. Silence; and then a howl along
the wind as a night-prowler scented the ponies.
Bats—unimaginable thousands of them, black, and less black than
the night—until the air was all alive with movement and the squeak and
smell. Chasms into which the ponies’ hoofs struck stones that seemed to
fall for ever, soundless. Dawn at last, touching untrodden peaks with
crimson—gleaming gold, and stealing lemon-colored down the pillars of
the sky, to awaken ghosts of shadows in the black ravines. Tree-tops,
waist-deep in an opal mist, an eagle—seven thousand feet below the
track—circling above those like a fleck of blown dirt. A roar ascending
full of crashing tumult; and at last a flash of silver on the waves of
Brahmaputra, a mile and a half below, plunging toward Bengal through
the rock-staked jaws of Ahbor Valley Gate.
Downward then, by a trail that seemed to swing between earth and
sky, the ponies sliding half the time with their rumps against the rock or
picking their way cautiously with six-inch strides along the edge of
chasms, over which the riders peered into fathomless shadow that the
sunlight had not reached. Down to the eagle-level, and the tree-line,
where the wet scent of morning on moss and golden gravel made the
ponies snort and they had to be unsaddled and allowed to roll.
Not a word from the sirdar, although he stroked Diana’s head when
she approached him, and laughed at the ponies’ antics. On again
downward, and a hut at last, built of tree-trunks, perched on a ledge of
rock above a waterfall, on the rim of a tree-hung bowl through which the
Brahmaputra plunged.

[41]Spiti and Ladak are Hill States separated by huge ranges, and
their customs are as different as their climate and geography, although
their actual distance apart is not great.

CHANT PAGAN

When that caressing light forgets the hills

That change their hue in its evolving grace;
When, harmony of swaying reeds and rills,
The breeze forgets her music and the face
Of Nature smiles no longer in the pond,
Divinity revealed! When morning peeps
Above earth’s rim, and no bird notes respond;
When half a world in mellow moonlight sleeps
And no peace pours along the silver’d air;
When dew brings no wet wonder of delight
On jeweled spider-web and scented lair
Of drone and hue and honey; when the night
No longer shadows the retreating day,
Nor purple dawn pursues the graying dark;
And no child laughs; and no wind bears away
The bursting glory of the meadow-lark;
Then—then it may be—never until then
May death be dreadful or assurance wane
That we shall die a while, to waken when
New morning summons us to earth again.
 CHAPTER XXVII
UNDER THE BRAHMAPUTRA.

S came from the hut, through a hole in the roof, giving the
sharp air a delicious tang, all mixed with the aroma of fallen leaves and
pine trunks. Over beyond the hut spray splashed from the waterfall—
rose-colored diamonds against moss-green. The air was full of bird-
music, that the ear caught after it was once used to the ponderous roar of
water.
A man who was undoubtedly an Ahbor—black hair low down on his
forehead, high up on his cheeks—Mongolian cheek-bones—glittering,
dark, bold eyes—hairy legs showing beneath a leather-colored smock—
waist girdled with a leather belt, from which a kukri like a Gurkha’s hung
in a wooden scabbard—peered from the hut door. He stared at the sirdar
in silence, curiously, as at some one he must tolerate; it was the half-shy,
half-impudent stare of a yokel at a wealthy man from town.
He took the ponies and was very careful of them, unsaddling, leading
them to drink, dragging out a sack and spilling grain in the hollow of a
rock, feeling their legs and rubbing them down with a piece of bark
while they munched contentedly.
The sirdar led the way into the hut, but laid a finger on his lips for
silence. The reason for silence was not evident; there was nobody else in
there. The place was clean, but almost bare of furniture; there was a
hearth of rough stones in the midst, a rough table, and a bunk in one
corner, littered with blue trade-blankets. There was no bench—no chairs
or stools—but there were wooden platters on the table, with big silver
spoons beside them, and on the hearth imported cereal was cooking in an
earthen vessel set in a brass one containing water. There was honey in a
white china bowl, and a big glass pitcher full of milk, which looked as if
it had stood there overnight; the layer of cream was more than an inch
thick. There were two cups, without handles, made of alabaster.
In silence, as if it were a ritual, the sirdar served the meal and they
ate it standing. Then he walked out and sat on a rock that overhung the
waterfall. He was not cross-legged in the usual Indian attitude of
meditation; his long booted and spurred legs were out in front of him, the
way a white man sits, and he leaned an elbow on one knee, his chin on
his right fist; motionless in that attitude he stared at the bewildering view
until he seemed almost physically to become a part of it.
 Ommony watched him from the hut door, now and then losing sight
of his form in the spray as he wondered what sort of thinking it might be
that could so absorb the man, and as he watched, wondering, his own
inclination was to take his shoes off; he felt a pagan reverence possess
him, as if that dew-wet, emerald and brown immensity, with the
thundering river below and the blue sky for a roof, were a temple of
Mother Nature, in which it were impertinence to speak, imposture to
assert a personality.
Diana was watching fish in a pool above the waterfall; the aborigine
from Ahbor was using his kukri to fashion a wooden implement with
which to comb the ponies’ manes and tails; the birds were hopping on
tree and rock about their ordinary business, and an eagle circled
overhead as if he had been doing the same thing for centuries. But there
began to be a sensation of having stepped into another world.
Things assumed strange and strangely beautiful proportions. The
whole of the past became a vaguely remembered dream, in which the
Lama, Samding and Hannah Sanburn stood out as the only important
realities. The present moment was eternity, and wholly satisfying. Every
motion of a glistening leaf, each bird-note, every gesture of the nodding
grass, each drop of spray was, of and in itself, in every detail perfect.
Something breathed—he did not know what, or want to inquire—he was
part of what breathed; and a universe, of which he was also a part,
responded with infinite rhythm of color, form, sound, movement, ebb
and flow, life and death, cause and effect, all one, yet infinitely
individual, enwrapped in peace and wrought of magic, of which Beauty
was the living, all-conceiving light.
The enchantment ceased as gradually as it had begun. He felt his
mind struggling to hold it—knew that he had seen Truth naked—knew
that nothing would ever satisfy him until he should regain that vision—
and was aware of the sirdar walking toward him, normal, matter-of-fact,
abrupt, spurs clinking as his heels struck rock.
“Are you ready?” asked the sirdar.
Ommony whistled and Diana followed them along a fern-hung ledge.
There was opal air beneath them; crags and tree-tops peered out of slow-
moving mist that the sun was beginning to tempt upward. Presently,
leaping from rock to rock, until they could hear the river laughing and
shouting, sending echoes crashing through a forest that had looked like
moss from higher up, they descended breathless, downward, and for ever
downward, leaping wild water that gushed between worn bowlders,