The Hungry Stones | Page 9

but
there was no one to whom I could lay it bare, or of whom I could ask
forgiveness. I wandered about the dark rooms with a vacant mind. I
wished I had a guitar to which I could sing to the unknown: "O fire, the
poor moth that made a vain effort to fly away has come back to thee!
Forgive it but this once, burn its wings and consume it in thy flame!"
Suddenly two tear-drops fell from overhead on my brow. Dark masses
of clouds overcast the top of the Avalli hills that day. The gloomy
woods and the sooty waters of the Susta were waiting in terrible
suspense and in an ominous calm. Suddenly land, water, and sky
shivered, and a wild tempest-blast rushed howling through the distant
pathless woods, showing its lightning-teeth like a raving maniac who
had broken his chains. The desolate halls of the palace banged their
doors, and moaned in the bitterness of anguish.
The servants were all in the office, and there was no one to light the
lamps. The night was cloudy and moonless. In the dense gloom within I

could distinctly feel that a woman was lying on her face on the carpet
below the bed--clasping and tearing her long dishevelled hair with
desperate fingers. Blood was tricking down her fair brow, and she was
now laughing a hard, harsh, mirthless laugh, now bursting into violent
wringing sobs, now rending her bodice and striking at her bare bosom,
as the wind roared in through the open window, and the rain poured in
torrents and soaked her through and through.
All night there was no cessation of the storm or of the passionate cry. I
wandered from room to room in the dark, with unavailing sorrow.
Whom could I console when no one was by? Whose was this intense
agony of sorrow? Whence arose this inconsolable grief?
And the mad man cried out: "Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All
is false!!"
I saw that the day had dawned, and Meher Ali was going round and
round the palace with his usual cry in that dreadful weather. Suddenly
it came to me that perhaps he also had once lived in that house, and that,
though he had gone mad, he came there every day, and went round and
round, fascinated by the weird spell cast by the marble demon.
Despite the storm and rain I ran to him and asked: "Ho, Meher Ali,
what is false?"
The man answered nothing, but pushing me aside went round and
round with his frantic cry, like a bird flying fascinated about the jaws of
a snake, and made a desperate effort to warn himself by repeating:
"Stand back! Stand back!! All is false! All is false!!"
I ran like a mad man through the pelting rain to my office, and asked
Karim Khan: "Tell me the meaning of all this!"
What I gathered from that old man was this: That at one time countless
unrequited passions and unsatisfied longings and lurid flames of wild
blazing pleasure raged within that palace, and that the curse of all the
heart-aches and blasted hopes had made its every stone thirsty and
hungry, eager to swallow up like a famished ogress any living man who
might chance to approach. Not one of those who lived there for three
consecutive nights could escape these cruel jaws, save Meher Ali, who
had escaped at the cost of his reason.
I asked: "Is there no means whatever of my release?" The old man said:
"There is only one means, and that is very difficult. I will tell you what
it is, but first you must hear the history of a young Persian girl who

once lived in that pleasure-dome. A stranger or a more bitterly
heart-rending tragedy was never enacted on this earth."
Just at this moment the coolies announced that the train was coming.
So soon? We hurriedly packed up our luggage, as the tram steamed in.
An English gentleman, apparently just aroused from slumber, was
looking out of a first-class carriage endeavouring to read the name of
the station. As soon as he caught sight of our fellow-passenger, he cried,
"Hallo," and took him into his own compartment. As we got into a
second-class carriage, we had no chance of finding out who the man
was nor what was the end of his story.
I said; "The man evidently took us for fools and imposed upon us out of
fun. The story is pure fabrication from start to finish." The discussion
that followed ended in a lifelong rupture between my theosophist
kinsman and myself.

THE VICTORY
She was the Princess Ajita. And the court poet of King Narayan had
never seen her. On the day he recited a