He sat down mechanically on the uppermost of the steps, and gave himself up, as it were, to the night, conscious of a vague content that it should be so dark.
To begin with, it hid many things best left unseen--himself most of all! For that meant forgetfulness of much. His dress-clothes, for instance, and things to be classed with them! Then it hid the railway bridge--strange sight in such environment--which spanned the river a few yards below the little spit of rock, ending the steps, on which the more modern temple sacred to Kâli, Shiva's consort, had been built. But something more modern still found foothold on that same spit of rock, though farther out, hidden below the levels of the river. This was the first pier of the railway bridge, from which the two drawbridges--one towards the town, the other towards the river--were worked; thus securing the passage against attack from either side. The pier itself rose sheer from the water, a solid block of masonry, and was prolonged into a tower, gated at each end.
Chris, picturing it in his mind's eye, thought how quaint a neighbour it was even to Kâli's temple, though her cult could not claim the mystery, the significance, of the other. Hers was the cult of ignorance, of terror; and his----
He was a Smarrta Brahmin by birth, and as he sate there in the darkness, thinking of that upright stone--severe, rigid in its mysticism--and then of the many-armed, bloodstained idol in the temple beyond, a proud exultation in his own priesthood to the older cult surged up in him.
He had almost forgotten his birthright, forgotten that he had been called by God to a place of honour--to the place of teacher; that his was the right to explain the mystery to the people, to show them the way of salvation.
But he remembered it now, and all insensibly a balm came to his pain from the knowledge of what lay about him, unseen, yet familiar. He sate, listening to the lap of the river on the foot-worn steps, picturing to himself its fringe of dead flower-petals from the dead day's worship: and even the stir in the vague shadow of the _pipal_ trees, telling of the sacred monkeys who with the dawn would descend to claim their share of offerings with the gods, seemed to still his own restlessness.