water-jars, the parrakeets flew shrieking among the tamarind-trees before they settled for the night, and our lank Moslem knelt and bent to the ground in repeated prayers to the Mecca beyond the sunset.
When we went to the midnight train that was to take us away, a raja and his suite were just arriving from Bankipur. There was hurry and excitement, a rushing to and fro of richly dressed attendants, and much glitter and splendor and flash of color, as the torch-bearers led the raja in his jeweled turban to the low dhoolie suspended from a curved silver yoke, and, lifting it, bore him out into the night. The voices of his followers died away as the flicker of the torches was finally lost down the road, but the last impression of Gaya was of that raja sitting cross-legged, like a god, in his silver and velvet car, departing by torch-light to some palace, whence he would issue before sunrise to bathe in the Phalgu, to worship the Bo-tree and the Vishnupad—all living traces of the great religion obliterated, like Gautama's own footprints in that dusty road; the Light of Asia forever extinguished on the spot where it first rose upon the world; the great temple and the Sacred Bo-tree drowsing, neglected, in the sunshine of an empty, lifeless court; the temple of a sleeping Buddha, of a dead religion, everything turned to stone, when there have passed but half of those five thousand years that the Master declared his religion would endure, an annihilation greater and more complete than Nirvana already come to the faith in its birthplace.
