suffering from the effects of world changes. And as we come up

to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the

everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is

continually more manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so

well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship

that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery

of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited

ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted

against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.

They tell us of the feelings of old people who have been wrenched

away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make

peace with uncomfortable comforts and conveniences that are still

strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening

egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing

social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousy to

capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical

misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spirit of

adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the

universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to

happiness missed or happiness won, to disaster or salvation. The

clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more

certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation

for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for

those upon it who will follow it far enough…

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former

time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether

the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But

assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many

temporary forms behind. Christianity was the first expression of

world religion, the first complete repudiation of tribalism and

war and disputation. That it fell presently into the ways of more

ancient rituals cannot alter that. The common sense of mankind

has toiled through two thousand years of chastening experience to

find at last how sound a meaning attaches to the familiar phrases

of the Christian faith. The scientific thinker as he widens out

to the moral problems of the collective life, comes inevitably

upon the words of Christ, and as inevitably does the Christian,

as his thoughtgrows clearer, arrive at the world republic. As

for the claims of the sects, as for the use of a name and

successions, we live in a time that has shaken itself free from

such claims and consistencies.

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN

Section 1

The second operation upon Marcus Karenin was performed at the new

station for surgical work at Paran, high in the Himalayas above

the Sutlej Gorge, where it comes down out of Thibet.

It is a place of such wildness and beauty as no other scenery in

the world affords. The granite terrace which runs round the four

sides of the low block of laboratories looks out in every

direction upon mountains. Far below in the hidden depths of a

shadowy blue cleft, the river pours down in its tumultuous

passage to the swarming plains of India. No sound of its roaring

haste comes up to those serenities. Beyond that blue gulf, in

which whole forests of giant deodars seem no more than small

patches of moss, rise vast precipices of many-coloured rock,

fretted above, lined by snowfalls, and jagged into pinnacles.

These are the northward wall of a towering wilderness of ice and

snow which clambers southward higher and wilder and vaster to the

culminating summits of our globe, to Dhaulagiri and Everest.

Here are cliffs of which no other land can show the like, and

deep chasms in which Mt. Blanc might be plunged and hidden. Here

are icefields as big as inland seas on which the tumbled boulders

lie so thickly that strange little flowers can bloom among them

under the untempered sunshine. To the northward, and blocking

out any vision of the uplands of Thibet, rises that citadel of

porcelain, that gothic pile, the Lio Porgyul, walls, towers, and

peaks, a clear twelve thousand feet of veined and splintered rock

above the river. And beyond it and eastward and westward rise

peaks behind peaks, against the dark blue Himalayan sky. Far

away below to the south the clouds of the Indian rains pile up

abruptly and are stayed by an invisible hand.

Hither it was that with a dreamlike swiftness Karenin flew high

over the irrigations of Rajputana and the towers and cupolas of

the ultimate Delhi; and the little group of buildings, albeit the

southward wall dropped nearly five hundred feet, seemed to him as

he soared down to it like a toy lost among these mountain

wildernesses. No road came up to this place; it was reached only

by flight.

His pilot descended to the great courtyard, and Karenin assisted

by his secretary clambered down through the wing fabric and made

his way to the officials who came out to receive him.

In this place, beyond infections and noise and any distractions,

surgery had made for itself a house of research and a healing

fastness. The building itself would have seemed very wonderful to

eyes accustomed to the flimsy architecture of an age when power

was precious. It was made of granite, already a little roughened

on the outside by frost, but polished within and of a tremendous

solidity. And in a honeycomb of subtly lit apartments, were the

spotless research benches, the operating tables, the instruments

of brass, and fine glass and platinum and gold. Men and women

came from all parts of the world for study or experimental

research. They wore a common uniform of white and ate at long

tables together, but the patients lived in an upper part of the

buildings, and were cared for by nurses and skilled

attendants…

The first man to greet Karenin was Ciana, the scientific director

of the institution. Beside him was Rachel Borken, the chief