Chapter One

Add to this dense and lightless forest the hour of night. The second watch of night had come. The night was exceeding dark; even beyond the woodland it was dark, and naught could be discerned. Within the wood, the mass of shadow was as the blackness of the bowels of the earth itself.

The birds and the beasts were utterly hushed. How many lakhs and lakhs, how many crores and crores of beast and bird and creeping thing and insect dwelt within that forest — yet not one of them gave forth any sound. One might rather feel that darkness with the very skin — but the stillness of a world that is wont to be full of sound, that the senses could not encompass.

In that boundless forest, in that night whose darkness the very needle could not pierce, amid that stillness past all imagining, a voice arose: "Shall my heart's desire then not be fulfilled?"

The voice spoke and was lost again in the silence of the forest; and who then could have said that the voice of man had been heard within these woods? After a little while the voice spoke again, and again, churning that stillness, the human throat rang out: "Shall my heart's desire then not be fulfilled?"

Thus thrice was that ocean of darkness troubled. Then came the answer: "What is thy pledge?"

He answered, saying: "My pledge is all that life can offer — my very life itself."

Came the reply: "Life is a paltry thing; any man may yield it up."

"What else have I? What more shall I give?"

Then came the answer: "Devotion."