No answer comes.
For the blind Time gropes in a maze and knows not its path or purpose.
The darkness in the valley stares like the dead eye-sockets of a giant, the clouds like a nightmare oppress the sky, and the massive shadows lie scattered like the torn limbs of the night.
A lurid glow waxes and wanes on the horizon,
is it an ultimate threat from an alien-star,
or an elemental hunger licking the sky?
Things are deliriously wild,
they are a noise whose grammar is a groan,
and words smothered out of shape and sense.
They are the refuse, the rejections, the fruitless failures of life,
abrupt ruins of prodigal pride,
fragments of a bridge over the oblivion Of a vanished stream,
godless shrines that shelter reptiles,
marble steps that lead to blankness.
Sudden tumults rise in the sky and wrestle
and a startled shudder runs along the sleepless hours.
Are they from desperate floods
hammering against their cave walls,
or from some fanatic storms
whirling and howling incantations?
Are they the cry of an ancient forest
flinging up its hoarded fire in a last extravagant suicide,
or screams of a paralytic crowd scourged by lunatics blind and deaf?
Underneath the noisy terror a stealthy hum creeps up like
bubbling volcanic mud,
a mixture of sinister whispers, rumours and slanders, and hisses of derision.
The men gathered there are vague like torn pages of an epic.
Groping in groups or single, their torchlight tattoos their faces in chequered lines, in patterns of frightfulness.
The maniacs suddenly strike their neighbours on suspicion and a hubbub of an indiscriminate fight bursts forth echoing from hill to hill.
The women weep and wail,
they cry that their children are lost in a wilderness of contrary paths with confusion at the end.
Others defiantly ribald shake with raucous laughter
their lascivious limbs unshrinkingly loud,
for they think that nothing matters.
II
There on the crest of the hill
stands the Man of faith amid the snow-white silence,
He scans the sky for some signal of light,
and when the clouds thicken and the nightbirds scream as they fly
he cries, 'Brothers, despair not, for Man is great.'
But they never heed him,
for they believe that the elemental brute is eternal
and goodness in its depth is darkly cunning in deception.
When beaten and wounded they cry, 'Brother, where art thou?'
The answer comes, 'I am by your side.'
But they cannot see in the dark
and they argue that the voice is of their own desperate desire,
that men are ever condemned to fight for phantoms
in an interminable desert of mutual menace.
III
The clouds part, the morning star appears in the East,
a breath of relief springs up from the heart of the earth,
the murmur of leaves ripples along the forest path,
and the early bird sings.
'The time has come,' proclaims the Man of faith.
'The time for what?'
'For the pilgrimage.'
They sit and think, they know not the meaning,
and yet they seem to understand according to their desires.
The touch of the dawn goes deep into the soil
and life shivers along through the roots of all things.
'To the pilgrimage of fulfilment,' a small voice
whispers, nobody knows whence.
Taken up by the crowd
it swells into a mighty meaning.
Men raise their heads and look up,
women lift their arms in reverence,
children clap their hands and laugh.
The early glow of the sun shines like a golden garland
on the forehead of the Man of faith,
and they all cry: 'Brother, we salute thee!'
IV
Men begin to gather from all quarters,
from across the, seas, the mountains and pathless wastes,
They come from the valley of the Nile and the banks of the Ganges,
from the snow-sunk uplands of Thibet,
from high-walled
