A Light From the East Goes Out

To be in the heart of a great country, fifteen hundred miles from the
Atlantic, and two thousand miles from the Pacific, to be forbidden the
public highway of the train, and to have one's objective point
India,--this is by no means an easy problem, even to the oriental mind.
And who could know what was going on in the being that crept away into
the storm, strong with the instinct of hiding and of cunning. He must
have balanced all things. To go westward, where the great steamers plied
toward the Orient, this would seem the natural course; and yet that way
lay interminable prairies and empty stretches, and again deserts and
piled mountains, without shelter and without food. It is easier to hide
among people than amid solitudes. On crowded city streets, we jostle
without seeing.

It was no great feat to transform the once Swami of the flowing robes
and lofty port into a hulking skulking negro tramp, like the sturdy
villains of ancient days, sleeping in woody nooks by day, and pursuing
his slow journey under the stars, answering the look of such human
beings as he met with suspicion, keeping to the hamlets where police
officers were scarce and knowledge of the criminal world scarcer, and
where solitary house-wives, whose men were in the field, could be
persuaded, half through charity and half through fear, to dole out food.
Ah, but it was a weary journey. The world, of whose littleness we boast
when we think of steam and electricity, grows very sizable again when a
man comes back to the elemental means of progress--his own two legs. As
for the smaller world in which he had been living--the world of luxury
and of worshiping disciples--he laughed silently to think what a mirage
it was and always had been.