Atma - A Romance

When the old Sikh had ceased speaking, he lay greatly exhausted. The

night deepened. It was a remote spot. Now and then the sound of

trampling feet or the tread of a horse climbing the difficult road

reached the ear. The hours were long and dreary, but they passed.

Morning dawned, and Atma found himself alone. He had known that it would

be so, and yet it came with the sharpness of an unexpected blow. He

mourned, and, as is the way with mourners, he accused himself from hour

to hour of having failed in duty to the departed during his lifetime.

Looking on the face of the dead, he wondered much where the spirit that

so lately had seemed to be with the frame but a single identity, one and

indivisible, had fled. He recalled his father's words, "Upward or down, or toward the setting sun,

None knows," and with the recollection, the sense of loss deepened. An old cry rose

to his lips, "Oh, that I knew where I might find him!"

The words by which his father had sought to comfort him still sounded in

his hearing, but Grief is stronger than Wisdom. Human speech is the

least potent of forces, and arguments that clash and clang bravely in

the tournament of words, slaying shadows, and planting the flag of

triumph over fallen fancies, on entering the lists to combat the fact of

Death, but beat the air, and their lusty prowess only fetches a laugh

from out of the silence.