"The real thing?" Will shook his head. "Is there such a thing? I wish I could believe it."

"You're not being asked to believe it," said Dr. Robert. "The real thing isn't a proposition; it's a state of being. We don't teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols. When it's time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them four hundred milligrams of revelation. Two firsthand experiences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what's what."

"And don't forget the dear old power problem," said Vijaya. "Rock climbing's a branch of applied ethics; it's another preventive substitute for bullying."

"So my father ought to have been an Alpinist as well as a

woodchopper."

"One may laugh," said Vijaya, duly laughing. "But the fact remains that it works. It works. First and last I've climbed my way out of literally scores of the ugliest temptations to throw my weight around-and my weight being considerable," he added, "incitements were correspondingly strong."

"There seems to be only one catch," said Will. "In the process of climbing your way out of temptation, you might fall and ..." Suddenly remembering what had happened to Dugald MacPhail, he broke off.

It was Dr. Robert who finished the sentence. "Might fall," he said slowly, "and kill yourself. Dugald was climbing alone," he went on after a little pause. "Nobody knows what happened. The body wasn't found till the next day." There was a long

silence.

"Do you still think this is a good idea?" Will asked, pointing with his bamboo staff at the tiny figures crawling so laboriously on the face of that headlong wilderness of naked rock.

"I still think it's a good idea," said Dr. Robert.

"But poor Susila___"

"Yes, poor Susila," Dr. Robert repeated. "And poor children, poor Lakshmi, poor me. But if Dugald hadn't made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons. Better court the danger of killing yourself than court the danger of killing other people, or at the very least making them miserable. Hurting them because you're naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a precipice. And now," he continued in another tone, "I want to show you the view."

"And I'll go and talk to those boys and girls." Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.

Leaving Murugan to his Science Fiction, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city. Seen from this high vantage point in its shining completeness, it looked like the tiny, meticulous painting of a city in a medieval book of hours.

"There's Shivapuram," said Dr. Robert. "And that complex of buildings on the hill beyond the river-that's the great Buddhist temple. A little earlier than Borobudur, and the sculpture is as fine as anything in Further India." There was a silence. "This little summerhouse," he resumed, "is where we used to eat our picnics when it was raining. I shall never forget the time when Dugald (he must have been about ten) amused himself by climbing up here on the window ledge and standing on one leg in the attitude of the dancing Shiva. Poor Lakshmi, she was scared out of her wits. But Dugald was a born steeplejack. Which only makes the accident even more incomprehensible." He shook his head; then, after another silence, "The last time we all came up here," he said, "was eight or nine months ago. Dugald was still alive and Lakshmi wasn't yet too weak for a day's outing with her grandchildren. He did that Shiva stunt again for the benefit of Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini. On one leg; and he kept his arms moving so fast that one could have sworn there were four of them." Dr. Robert broke off. Picking up a flake of mortar from the floor, he tossed it out of the window. "Down, down, down . . . Empty space. Pascal avait son gouffre. How strange that this should be at once the most powerful symbol of death and the most powerful symbol of the fullest, intensest life." Suddenly his face lighted up. "Do you see that hawk?"

"A hawk?"

Dr. Robert pointed to where, halfway between their eyrie and the dark roof of the forest, a small brown incarnation of speed and rapine lazily wheeled on unmoving wings. "It reminds me of a poem that the Old Raja once wrote about this place." Dr. Robert was silent for a moment, then started to recite:

"And the secret, I take it, is this empty space."

"Or rather what this empty space is the symbol of-the Buddha Nature in all our perpetual perishing. Which reminds me . . ." He looked at his watch.

"What's next on the program?" Will asked as they stepped out into the glare.

"The service in the temple," Dr. Robert answered. "The young climbers will offer their accomplishment to Shiva-in other words, to their own Suchness visualized as God. After which they'll go on to the second part of their initiation-the experience of being liberated from themselves."

"By means of the moksha-medicine?"

Dr. Robert nodded. "Their leaders give it them before they leave the Climbing Association's hut. Then they come over to the temple. The stuff starts working during the service. Incidentally," he added, "the service is in Sanskrit, so you won't understand a word of it. Vijaya's address will be in English-he speaks in his capacity as president of the Climbing Association. So will mine. And of course the young people will mostly talk in English."

Inside the temple there was a cool, cavernous darkness, tempered only by the faint daylight filtering in through a pair of small latticed windows and by the seven lamps that hung, like a halo of yellow, quivering stars, above the head of the image on the altar. It was a copper statue, no taller than a child, of Shiva. Surrounded by a flame-fringed glory, his four arms gesturing, his braided hair wildly flying, his right foot treading down a dwarfish figure of the most hideous malignity, his left foot gracefully lifted, the god stood there, frozen in mid-ecstasy. No longer in their climbing dress, but sandaled, bare-breasted and in shorts or brightly colored skirts, a score of boys and girls, together with the six young men who had acted as their leaders and instructors, were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Above them, on the highest of the altar steps, an old priest, shaven and yellow-robed, was intoning something sonorous and incomprehensible. Leaving Will installed on a convenient ledge, Dr. Robert tiptoed over to where Vijaya and Murugan were sitting and squatted down beside them.