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0173 Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1
Tibet and Turkestan : vol.1 / Page 173 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000231
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Camp Purgatory   'of

fidingly turn for inspiration and for solace. But those who were chosen to tell us the story of this great life piled Pelion on Ossa of intellectual difficulty — Pelion of resurrection on Ossa of virgin birth. Frightened by these uplifted rocks, we are then forced to sail between the Scylla of individual interpretation of ancient writings, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Charybdis of severe church authority, rising from foundations of musty tradition. Under the lee of this Charybdis rock, Anginieur's bark, driven by fate, had been anchored, and some peace found, but a peace disturbed by thoughts of the many who seemed to have vanished out into the far sea of unbelief. And to ? there, where the storm of doubt has been outridden, there also is peace. There one sees his neighbour-barks sink quietly, sails all furled, into the sea from which they rose. Some, in the gradual engulfment of age, seem but to nestle back into the water as the tired child seeks its couch. Others, downward drawn by a law more sudden and more secret in its drift, swirl quickly out of vision.

As the mariner goes down, the clear sky around him is not peopled by fantastic forms of Jewish, Egyptian, Greek, or German myth. Under the smooth sea which receives him, no Satan, no Pluton dwells. The law gave him birth, set him to move athwart the sea of existence, called the voyage Life; is now about to end it, and for whatever he may now be, something or nothing, he is still held by the law. Or so it all seemed to me in the black silence of the nights when the days were ended and their hopes were buried with the setting sun. The