CHAPTER NINE

 

      "Patriotism is not enough.  But neither is anything else.  Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation.  Nothing short of everything will really do."

      "Attention!" shouted a far-away bird.

      Will looked at his watch.  Five to twelve.  He closed his Notes on What's What and picking up the bamboo alpenstock which had once belonged to Dugald MacPhail, he set out to keep his appointment with Vijaya and Dr Robert.  By the short cut the main building of the Experimental Station was less than a quarter of a mile from Dr Robert's bungalow.  But the day was oppressively hot, and there were two flights of steps to be negotiated.  For a convalescent with his right leg in a splint, it was a considerable journey.

      Slowly, painfully, Will made his way along the winding path and up the steps.  At the top of the second flight he halted to take breath and mop his forehead; then keeping close to the wall, where there was still a narrow strip of shade, he moved on towards a signboard marked LABORATORY.

      The door beneath the board was ajar; he pushed it open and found himself on the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged room.  There were the usual sinks and work tables, the usual glass-fronted cabinets full of bottles and equipment, the usual smells of chemicals and caged mice.  For the first moment Will was under the impression that the room was untenanted, but no - almost hidden from view by a bookcase that projected at right angles from the wall, young Murugan was seated at a table, intently reading.  As quietly as he could - for it was always amusing to take people by surprise - Will advanced into the room.  The whirring of an electric fan covered the sound of his approach, and it was not until he was within a few feet of the bookcase that Murugan became aware of his presence.  The boy started guiltily, shoved his book with panic haste into a leather briefcase and, reaching for another, smaller volume that lay open on the table beside the briefcase, drew it within reading range.  Only then did he turn to face the intruder.

      Will gave him a reassuring smile.  "It's only me."

      The look of angry defiance gave place, on the boy's face, to one of relief.

      "I thought it was ..."  He broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

      "You thought it was someone who would bawl you out for not doing what you're supposed to do - is that it?"

      Murugan grinned and nodded his curly head.

      "Where's everyone else?" Will asked.

      "They're out in the fields - pruning and pollinating or something."  His tone was contemptuous.

      "And so, the cats being away, the mouse duly played.  What were you studying so passionately?"

      With innocent disingenuousness, Murugan held up the book he was now pretending to read.  "It's called 'Elementary Ecology'," he said.

      "So I see," said Will.  "But what I asked you was what were you reading?"

      "Oh that."  Murugan shrugged his shoulders.  "You wouldn't be interested."

      "I'm interested in everything that anyone tries to hide," Will assured him.  "Was it pornography?"

      Murugan dropped his play-acting and looked genuinely offended.  "Who do you take me for?"

      Will was on the point of saying that he took him for an average boy, but checked himself.  To Colonel Dipa's pretty young friend, 'average boy' might sound like an insult or innuendo.  Instead he bowed with mock politeness.  "I beg your Majesty's pardon," he said.  "But I'm still curious," he added in another tone.  "May I?"  He laid a hand on the bulging briefcase.

      Murugan hesitated for a moment, then forced a laugh.  "Go ahead."

      "What a tome!"  Will pulled the ponderous volume out of the bag and laid it on the table.  "Sears, Roebuck, and Co., Spring and Summer Catalog," he read aloud.

      "It's last year's," said Murugan apologetically.  "But I don't suppose there's been much change since then."

      "There," Will assured him, "you're mistaken.  If the styles weren't completely changed every year, there'd be no reason for buying new things before the old ones are worn out.  You don't understand the first principles of modern consumerism."  He opened at random.  "'Soft Platform Wedgies in Wide Widths.'"  Opened at another place and found the description and image of a Whisper-Pink bra in Dacron and Pima Cotton.  Turned the page and here, momento mori, was what the bra-buyer would be wearing twenty years later - a Strap-Controlled Front, Cupped to Support Pendulous Abdomen.

      "It doesn't get really interesting," said Murugan, "until near the end of the book.  It has thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages," he added parenthetically.  "Imagine!  Thirteen hundred and fifty-eight!"

      Will skipped the next hundred and fifty pages.

      "Ah, this is more like it," he said.  "'Our Famous 22 Revolvers and Automatics.'"  And here, a little further on, were the Fibre Glass Boats, here were the High Thrust Inboard Engines, here was a 12 h.p. Outboard for only $234.95 - and the Fuel Tank was included.  "That's extraordinarily generous!"

      But Murugan, it was evident, was no sailor.  Taking the book, he leafed impatiently through a score of additional pages.

      "Look at this Italian Style Motor Scooter!"  And while Will looked, Murugan read aloud.  "'This sleek Speedster gives up to 110 Miles per Gallon of Fuel.'  Just imagine!"  His normally sulky face was glowing with enthusiasm.  "And you can get up to sixty miles per gallon even on this 14.5 h.p. Motor Cycle.  And it's guaranteed to do seventy-five miles an hour - guaranteed!"

      "Remarkable!" said Will.  Then, curiously, "Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?" he asked.

      Murugan shook his head.  "Colonel Dipa gave it to me."

      "Colonel Dipa?"  What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinous!  He looked again at the picture of the motorbike, then back at Murugan's glowing face.  Light dawned; the Colonel's purpose revealed itself.  The serpent tempted me and I did eat.  The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden , the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark naked.  The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.

      "You ought," Will said aloud, "to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them - gratis, of course, like contraceptives - to all your subjects."

      "What for?"

      "To wet their appetite for possessions.  Then they'll start clamouring for Progress - oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians."

      Murugan frowned and shook his head.  "It wouldn't work."

      "You mean, they wouldn't be tempted?  Not even by sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras?  But that's incredible!"

      "It may be incredible," said Murugan bitterly; "but it's a fact.  They're just not interested."

      "Not even the young ones?"

      "I'd say especially the young ones."

      Will Farnaby pricked up his ears.  This lack of interest was profoundly interesting.  "Can you guess why?" he asked.

      "I don't guess," the boy answered.  "I know."  And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance.  "To begin with, they're much too busy with ...” He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis.  "With sex."

      "But everybody's busy with sex.  Which doesn't keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters."

      "Sex is different here," Murugan insisted.

      "Because of the yoga of love?" Will asked, remembering the little nurse's rapturous face.

      The boy nodded.  They've got something that makes them think they're perfectly happy, and they don't want anything else."

      "What a blessed state!"

      "There's nothing blessed about it," Murugan snapped.  "It's just stupid and disgusting.  No progress, only sex, sex, sex.  And of course that beastly dope they're all given."

      "Dope?" Will repeated in some astonishment.  Dope in a place where Susila had said there were no addicts?  "What kind of dope?"

      "It's made out of toadstools.  Toadstools!"  He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani's most vibrant tone of outraged spirituality.

      "Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?"

      "No, these are yellow.  People used to go out and collect them in the mountains.  Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station.  Scientifically cultivated dope.  Pretty, isn't it?"

      A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor.  Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies.  In a trice 'Elementary Ecology' had taken the place of Sears Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table.  A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labour in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room.  Behind him came Dr Robert.  With the air of a model student interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked his from his book.  Amused, Will threw himself at once wholeheartedly into the part that had been assigned to him.

      "It was I who got here too early," he said in response to Vijaya's apologies for their being so late.  "With the result that our young friend here hasn't been able to get on with the lessons.  We've been talking our heads off."

      "What about?" Dr Robert asked.

      "Everything.  Cabbages, kings, motor scooters, pendulous abdomens.  And when you came in, we'd just embarked on toadstools.  Murugan was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope."

      "What's in a name?" said Dr Robert with a laugh.  "Answer, practically everything.  Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditional reflex, the dirty word evokes.  We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names - the moksha-medicine, the reality-revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill.  And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved.  Whereas our young friend here has no first-hand knowledge of the stuff and can't be persuaded even to give it a try.  For him, it's dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in."

      "What does His Highness say to that?" Will asked.

      Murugan shook his head.  "All it gives you is a lot of illusions," he muttered.  "Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?"

      "Why indeed?" said Vijaya with good-humoured irony.  "Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!"

      "I never said that," Murugan protested. "All I mean is that I don't want any of your false samadhi."

      "How do you know it's false?" Dr Robert inquired.

      "Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and ... well, you know - not going with women."

      "Murugan," Vijaya explained to Will, "is one of the Puritans.  He's outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrammes of moksha-medicine in their blood systems, even beginners - yes, and even boys and girls who make love together - can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego."

      "But it isn't real," Murugan insisted.

      "Not real!" Dr Robert repeated.  "You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn't real."

      "You're begging the question," Will objected.  "An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull, but completely irrelevant to anything outside."

      "Of course," Dr Robert agreed.

      "Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you've taken a dose of the mushroom?"

      "We know a little."

      "And we're trying all the time to find out more," Vijaya added.

      "For example," said Dr Robert, "we've found that the people whose EEG doesn't show any alpha-wave activity when they're relaxed, aren't likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine.  That means that, for about fifteen per cent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation."

      "Another thing we're just beginning to understand," said Vijaya, "is the neurological correlate of these experiences.  What's happening in the brain when you're having a vision?  And what's happening when you pass from a pre-mystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?"

      "Do you know?" Will asked.

      "'Know' is a big word.  Let's say we're in a position to make some plausible guesses.  Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas - they're all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection - the visual cortex, for example.  Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven't yet found out.  The important fact is that, somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling."

      "And how do the silent areas respond?" Will inquired.

      "Let's start with what they don't respond with.  They don't respond with visions or auditions, they don't respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any kind of parapsychological performance.  None of that amusing pre-mystical stuff.  Their response is the full-blown mystical experience.  You know - One in all and All in one.  The basic experience with its corollaries - boundless compassion, fathomless mystery, and meaning."

      "Not to mention joy," said Dr Robert, "inexpressible joy."

      "And the whole caboodle is inside your skull," said Will.  "Strictly private.  No reference to any external fact except a toadstool."

      "Not real," Murugan chimed in.  That's exactly what I was trying to say."

      "You're assuming," said Dr Robert, "that the brain produces consciousness.  I'm assuming that it transmits consciousness.  And my explanation is no more far-fetched than yours.  How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order?  Nobody has the faintest idea.  All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses.  And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another.  You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name 'mystical experience'.  I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large 'M' to flow into your mind with a small 'm'.  You can't demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can't demonstrate the truth of mine.  And even if you could prove that I'm wrong, would it make any practical difference?"

      "I'd have thought it would make all the difference," said Will.

      "Do you like music?" Dr Robert asked.

      "More than most things."

      "And what, may I ask, does Mozart's G Minor Quintet refer to?  Does it refer to Allah?  Or Tao?  Or the second person of the Trinity?  Or the Atman-Brahman?"

      Will laughed.  "Let's hope not."

      "But that doesn't make the experience of the G Minor Quintet any less rewarding.  Well, it's the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises.  Even if it doesn't refer to anything outside itself, it's still the most important thing that ever happened to you.  Like music, only incomparably more so.  And if you give the experience a chance, if you're prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming.  So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one's skull.  Maybe it is private and there's no unitive knowledge of anything but one's own physiology.  Who cares?  The fact remains that the experience can open one's eyes and make one blessed and transform one's whole life."  There was a long silence.  "Let me tell you something," he resumed, turning to Murugan.  "Something I hadn't intended to talk about to anybody.  But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people - an obligation to tell you about this very private experience.  Perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways."  He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, "I suppose you know my wife," he went on.

      His face still averted, Murugan nodded.  "I was sorry," he mumbled, "to hear that she was so ill."

      "It's a matter of a few days now," said Dr Robert.  "Four or five at the most.  But she's still perfectly lucid, perfectly conscious of what's happening to her.  Yesterday she asked me if we could take the moksha-medicine together.  We'd taken it together," he added parenthetically, "once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years - ever since we decided to get married.  And now once more - for the last time, the last, last time.  There was a risk involved, because of the damage to the liver.  But we decided it was a risk worth taking.  And as it turned out, we were right.  The moksha-medicine - the dope, as you prefer to call it - hardly upset her at all.  All that happened to her was the mental transformation."

      He was silent, and Will suddenly became aware of the squeak and scrabble of caged rats and, through the open window, the babel of tropical life and the call of a distant myrah-bird.  "Here and now, boys.  Here and now ..."

      "You're like that mynah," said Dr Robert at last, "trained to repeat words you don't understand or know the reason for, 'It isn't real, it isn't real.'   But if you'd experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday, you'd know better.  You'd know it was much more real than what you call reality.  More real than what you're thinking and feeling at this moment.  More real than the world before your eyes.  But not real is what you've been taught to say.  Not real, not  real."  Dr Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy's shoulder.  "You've been told that we're just a set of self-indulgent dope-takers, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis.  Listen, Murugan -forget all the bad language that's been pumped into you.  Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment.  Take four hundred milligrammes of moksha-medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you've got to live in, suffer in, and finally die in.  Yes, even you will have to die one day - maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow.  Who knows?  But it's going to happen, and one's a fool if one doesn't prepare for it."  He turned to Will.  "Would you like to come along while we take our shower and get into some clothes?"

      Without waiting for an answer, he walked out through the door that led into the central corridor of the long building.  Will picked up his bamboo staff and, accompanied by Vijaya, followed him out of the room.

      "Do you suppose that made any impression on Murugan?" he asked Vijaya when the door had closed behind them.

      Vijaya shrugged his shoulders.  "I doubt it."

      "What with his mother," said Will, "and his passion for internal combustion engines, he's probably impervious to anything you people can say.  You should have heard him on the subject of motor scooters!"

      "We have heard him," said Dr Robert, who had halted in front of a blue door and was waiting for them to come up with him.  "Frequently.  When he comes of age, scooters are going to become a major political issue."

      Vijaya laughed.  "To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question."

      "And it isn't only in Pala that it's the question," Dr Robert added.  "It's the question that every underdeveloped country has to answer one way or the other."

      "And the answer," said Will, "is always the same.  Wherever I've been - and I've been almost everywhere - they've opted wholeheartedly for scooting.  All of them."

      "Without exception," Vijaya agreed.  "Scooting for scooting's sake, and to hell with all considerations of fulfilment, self-knowledge, liberation.  Not to mention common or garden health or happiness."

      "Whereas we," said Dr Robert, "have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings - not our human beings to someone else's economy and technology.  We import what we can't make; but we make and import only what we can afford.  And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also and primarily - primarily," he insisted - "by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human.  Scooters, we've decided after carefully looking into the matter, are among the things - the very numerous things - we simply can't afford.  Which is something that poor little Murugan will have to learn the hard way - seeing that he hasn't learned, and doesn't want to learn, the easy way."

      "Which is the easy way?" Will asked.

      "Education and reality-revealers.  Murugan has had neither.  Or rather he's had the opposite of both.  He's had miseducation in Europe - Swiss governesses, English tutors, American movies, everybody's advertisements - and he's had reality eclipsed for him by his mother's brand of spirituality.  So it's no wonder he pines for scooters."

      "But his subjects, I gather, do not."

      "Why should they?  They've been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness.  And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other peoples as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers.  Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles.  Jewels and miracles," he repeated emphatically.  "So why should we resort to scooters or whisky or television or Billy Graham or any other of your distractions and compensations."

      "'Nothing short of everything will really do,'" Will quoted.  "I see now what the Old Raja was talking about.  You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist.  Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician."

      "And don't forget all the other sciences," said Dr Robert.  "Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysticism, and the ultimate science," he added, looking away so as to be more alone with his thoughts of Lakshmi in the hospital, "the science that sooner or later we shall all have to be examined in - thanatology."  He was silent for a moment; then, in another tone, "Well, let's go and get washed up," he said and, opening the blue door, led the way into a long changing room with a row of showers and wash-basins at one end and, on the opposite wall, tiers of lockers and a large hanging cupboard.

      Will took a seat, and while his companions lathered themselves at the basins, went on with their conversation.

      "Would it be permissible?" he asked, "for a miseducated alien to try and truth-and-beauty pill?"

      The answer was another question.  "Is your liver in good order?" Dr Robert inquired.

      "Excellent."

      "And you don't seem to be more than mildly schizophrenic.  So I can't see any counter-indication."

      "Then I can make the experiment."

      "Whenever you like."

      He stepped into the nearest shower stall and turned on the water.  Vijaya followed suit.

      "Aren't you supposed to be intellectuals?" Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves.

      "We do intellectual work," Vijaya answered.

      "Then why all this horrible honest toil?"

      "For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time."

      "So did I," said Dr Robert.

      "So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act."

      Vijaya laughed.  "You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons."

      "Don't you?"

      "Certainly not.  I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don't use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict."

      "With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks," said Dr Robert.  "Or rather with everything - but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation.  Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts.  That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome.  In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a money-lender, even a metaphysician.  And when they weren't using their legs, they were jogging about on horses.  Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine-tenths of your time on foam rubber.  Spongy seats for spongy bottoms - at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses.  No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity - just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting.  The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them."

      "So you take to digging and delving as a form of therapy?"

      "As prevention - to make therapy unnecessary.  In Pala even a professor, even a government official generally puts in two hours of digging and delving each day."

      "As part of his duties?"

      "And as part of his pleasure."

      Will made a grimace.  "It wouldn't be part of my pleasure."

      "That's because you weren't taught to use your mind-body in the right way," Vijaya explained.  "If you'd been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you'd enjoy even honest toil."

      "I take it that your children all get this kind of training."

      "From the first moment they start doing for themselves.  For example, what's the proper way of handling yourself while you're buttoning your clothes?"  And suiting action to words, Vijaya started to button the shirt he had just slipped into.  "We answer the question by actually putting their heads and bodies into the physiologically best position.  And we encourage them at the same time to notice how it feels to be in the physiologically best position, to be aware of what the process of doing up buttons consists of in terms of touches and pressures and muscular sensations.  By the time they're fourteen they've learned how to get the most and the best - objectively and subjectively - out of any activity they may undertake.  And that's when we start them working.  Ninety minutes a day at some kind of manual job."

      "Back to good old child labour!"

      "Or rather," said Dr Robert, "forward from bad new child-idleness.  You don't allow your teenagers to work; so they have to blow off steam in delinquency or else throttle down steam till they're ready to become domesticated sitting-addicts.  And now," he added, "it's  time to be going.  I'll lead the way."

      In the laboratory, when they entered, Murugan was in the act of locking his briefcase against all prying eyes.  "I'm ready," he said and, tucking the thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages of the Newest Testament under his arm, he followed them out into the sunshine.  A few minutes later, crammed into an ancient jeep, the four of them were rolling along the road that led, past the paddock of the white bull, past the lotus pool and the huge stone Buddha, out through the gate of the Station Compound to the highway.  "I'm sorry we can't provide more comfortable transportation," said Vijaya as they bumped and rattled along.

      Will patted Murugan's knee.  "This is the man you should be apologizing to," he said.  "The one whose soul yearns for Jaguars and Thunderbirds."

      "It's a yearning, I'm afraid," said Dr Robert from the back seat, "that will have to remain unsatisfied."

      Murugan made no comment, but smiled the secret contemptuous smile of one who knows better.

      "We can't import toys," Dr Robert went on.  "Only essentials."

      "Such as?"

      "You'll see in a moment."  They rounded a curve, and there beneath them were the thatched roofs and tree-shaded gardens of a considerable village.  Vijaya pulled up at the side of the road and turned off the motor.  "You're looking at New Rothamsted," he said.  "Alias Medalia.  Rice, vegetables, poultry, fruit.  Not to mention two potteries and a furniture factory.  Hence those wires."  He waved his hand in the direction of the long row of pylons that climbed up the terraced slope behind the village, dipped out of sight over the ridge, and reappeared, far away, marching up from the floor of the next valley towards the green belt of mountain jungle and the cloudy peaks beyond and above.  "That's one of the indispensable imports - electric equipment.  And when the waterfalls have been harnessed and you've strung up the transmission lines, here's something else with a high priority."  He directed a pointing finger at a windowless block of houses near the upper entrance to the village.

      "What is it?" Will asked.  "Some kind of electric oven?"

      "No, the kilns are over on the other side of the village.  This is the communal freezer."

      "In the old days," Dr Robert explained, "we used to lose about half of all the perishables we produced.  Now we lose practically nothing.  Whatever we grow is for us, not for the circumambient bacteria."

      "So now you have enough to eat."

      "More than enough.  We eat better than any other country in Asia, and there's a surplus for export.  Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism.  Our equations are rather different.  Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty.  Electricity plus heaven industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war."

      "Incidentally," Will asked, "who owns all this?  Are you capitalists or state socialists?"

      "Neither.  Most of the time we're co-operators.  Palanese agriculture has always been an affair of terracing and irrigation.  But terracing and irrigation call for pooled efforts and friendly agreements.  Cut-throat competition isn't compatible with rice-growing in a mountainous country.  Our people found it quite easy to pass from mutual aid in a village community to streamlined co-operative techniques for buying and selling and profit-sharing and financing."

      "Even co-operative financing?"

      Dr Robert nodded.  "None of those blood-sucking usurers that you find all over the Indian countryside.  And no commercial banks in your Western style.  Our borrowing and lending system was modelled on those credit unions that Wilhelm Raiffeisen set up more than a century ago in Germany.  Dr Andrew persuaded the Raja to invite one of Raiffeisen's young men to come here and organize a co-operative banking system.  It's still going strong."

      "And what do you use for money?" Will asked.

      Dr Robert dipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, gold, and copper.

      "In a modest way," he explained, "Pala's a gold-producing country.  We mine enough to give our paper a solid metallic backing.  And the gold supplements our exports.  We can pay spot cash for expensive equipment like those transmission lines and the generators at the other end."

      "You seem to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully."

      "Solving them wasn't difficult.  To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity.  Not being over-populated, we have plenty.  But although we have plenty, we've managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to - the temptation to over-consume.  We don't give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need.  We don't hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set.  And finally we don't spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War's baby brother, Local War MMMCCXXXIII.  Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.  If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse.  And while you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.  Ignorance, militarism, and breeding, these three - and the greatest of these is breeding.  No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until that's under control.  As population rushes up, prosperity goes down."  He traced the descending curve with an outstretched finger.  "And as prosperity goes down, discontent and rebellion" (the forefinger moved up again), "political ruthlessness and one-party rule, nationalism and bellicosity begin to rise.  Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East, will be fairly crawling with Great Leaders, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom, all armed to the teeth by Russia or America or, better still, by both at once, all waving flags, all screaming for Lebensraum."

      "What about Pala?" Will asked.  "Will you be blessed with a Great Leader ten years from now?"

      "Not if we can help it," Dr Robert answered.  "We've always done everything possible to make it very difficult for our Great Leader to arise."

      Out of the corner of hiss eye Will saw that Murugan was making a face of indignant and contemptuous disgust.  In his fancy, Antinous evidently saw himself as a Carlylean Hero.  Will turned back to Dr Robert.

      "Tell me how you do it," he said.

      "Well, to begin with we don't fight wars or prepare for them.  Consequently we have no need for conscription, or military hierarchies, or a unified command.  Then there's our economic system: it doesn't permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average.  That means that we don't have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers.  Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats.  Pala's a federation of self-governing units, economic units - so there's plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government.  Another point: we have no established church, and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires.  So we're preserved from the plagues of popery on the one hand and fundamentalist revivalism on the other.  And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate scepticism.  Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyse whatever they hear or read - this is an integral part of the school curriculum.  Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbour across the strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn't have a chance here in Pala."

      This was too much for Murugan.  Unable to contain himself, "But look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people," he burst out.  "Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice!  We don't have anything like that here."

      "Thank God," said Dr Robert devoutly.

      "Thank God," Vijaya echoed.

      "But these things are good," the boy protested.  "I admire them."

      "I admire them too," said Dr Robert.  "Admire them in the same way as I admire a typhoon.  Unfortunately that kind of energy and devotion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not to mention reason and human decency.  But decency, reason, and liberty are what Pala has been working for, even since the time of your namesake, Murugan the Reformer."

      From under his seat Vijaya pulled out a tin box and, lifting the lid, distributed a first round of cheese and avocado sandwiches.  "We'll have to eat as we go."  He started the motor and with one hand, the other being busy with his sandwich, swung the little car on to the road.  "Tomorrow," he said to Will, "I'll show you the sights of the village, and the still more remarkable sight of my family eating their lunch.  Today we have an appointment in the mountains."

      Near the entrance to the village he turned the jeep into a side road that went winding steeply up between terraced fields of rice and vegetables, interspersed with orchards and, here and there, plantations of young trees destined, Dr Robert explained, to supply the pulp mills of Shivapuram with their raw material.

      "How many papers does Pala support?" Will inquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one.  "Who enjoys the monopoly?  The government?  The party in power?  The local Joe Aldehyde?"

      "Nobody enjoys a monopoly," Dr Robert assured him.  "There's a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests.  Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism.  The reader's in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind.  I remember how shocked I was, the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers.  The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument.  No serious appeal to reason.  Instead, a systematic effort to install condition reflexes in the minds of the voters - and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking."

      The car climbed on, and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and, to the right, a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.

      "Cement?" Will questioned.

      Dr Robert nodded.  "One of the indispensable industries.  We produce all we need and a surplus for export."

      "And those villages supply the man-power?"

      "In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills."

      "Does that kind of part-time system work well?"

      "It depends what you mean by 'well'.  It doesn't result in maximum efficiency.  But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn't the categorical imperative that it is with you.  You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time.  We think first of human beings and their satisfactions.  Changing jobs doesn't make for the biggest output in the fewest days.  But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives.  If it's a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction."

      "When I was twenty," Vijaya now volunteered, "I put in four months at that cement plant - and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack."

      "All this ghastly honest toil!"

      "Twenty years earlier," said Dr Robert, "I did a stint at the copper smelters.  After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat.  Sampling all kinds of work - it's part of everybody's education.  One learns an enormous amount that way - about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking."

      Will shook his head.  "I'd still rather get it out of a book."

      "But what you can get out of a book is never it.  At bottom," Dr Robert added, "all of you are still Platonists.  You worship the word and abhor matter!"

      "Tell that to the clergymen," said Will.  "They're always reproaching us with being crass materialists."

      "Crass," Dr Robert agreed, "but crass precisely because you're such inadequate materialists.  Abstract materialism - that's what you profess.  Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely - materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands.  Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism, it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible.  Sampling different kinds of work as concrete materialists is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality."

      "But even the most concrete materialism,” Vijaya qualified, "won't get you very far unless you're fully conscious of what you're doing and experiencing.  You've got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you're handling, the skills you're practising, the people you're working with."

      "Quite right," said Dr Robert.  "I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life.  It's through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality.  Be fully aware of what you're doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living."

      Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse.  "And what about love?"

      Dr Robert nodded.  "That too.  Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making."

      Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.

      "Psycho-physical means to a transcendental end," said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, "that, primarily, is what all these yogas are.  But they're also something else, they're also devices for dealing with the problems of power."  He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone.  "The problems of power," he repeated.  "And they confront you on every level of organization - every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples.  For it isn't merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders.  There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family.  Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labelled as criminals.  How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way - or at least prevent it from doing harm?"

      "That's what I want you to tell me," said Will.  "Where do you start?"

      "We start everywhere at once," Vijaya answered.  "But since one can't say more than one thing at a time, let's begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power.  Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr Robert."

      "It started," said Dr Robert, "nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London.  Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening.  History and prisons," he repeated.  "I discovered that they were closely related.  The record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind (that's Gibbon, isn't it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune.  Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions.  What kind of people became dangerous delinquents - the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs?  What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer?  And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun - who are they?  I used to discuss these questions with the experts - doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers.  Mantegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family.  It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments.  I was only half convinced.  Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense - these were obviously important.  But were they all-important?  In the course of my prison visiting I'd begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern - or rather of two kinds of built-in pattern; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving trouble-makers don't belong to a single species.  Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species - the Muscle People and the Peter Pans.  I've specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans."

      "The boys who never grow up?" Will queried.

      "'Never' is the wrong word.  In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up.  He merely grows up too late - grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays."

      "What about girl Peter Pans?"

      "They're very rare.  But the boys are as common as blackberries.  You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children.  And among problem children, among the boys who can't read, won't learn, don't get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency, seven out of ten turn out, if you take an X-ray of the bones of the wrist, to be Peter Pans.  The rest are mostly Muscle People of one sort or another."

      "I'm trying to think," said Will, "of a good historical example of a delinquent Peter Pan."

      "You don't have to go far afield.  The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler."

      "Hitler?"  Murugan's tone was one of shocked astonishment.  Hitler was evidently one of his heroes.

      "Read the Führer's biography," said Dr Robert.  "A Peter Pan if ever there was one.  Hopeless at school.  Incapable either of completing or co-operating.  Envying all the normally successful boys - and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings.  Then came the time for puberty.  But Adolf was sexually backward.  Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded.  Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood.  And all the time incapable of steady work, at home in the compensatory Other World of his fancy.  There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo.  Here, unfortunately, he couldn't draw.  His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for non-stop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia.  Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars - that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf's retarded maturation.  Fortunately most of the boys who grow up too slowly never get a chance of being more than minor delinquents.  But even minor delinquents, if there are enough of them, can exact a pretty stiff price.  That's why we try to nip them in the bud - or rather, since we're dealing with Peter Pans, that's why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow."

      "And do you succeed?"

      Dr Robert nodded.  "It isn't hard.  Particularly if you start early enough.  Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination.  Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X-ray their wrists and give them an EEG.  All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately.  Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal.  A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution's sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena - without punishment and without a sword.  In your part of the world, delinquency is still left to clergymen, social workers, and the police.  Non-stop sermons and supportive therapy; prison sentences galore.  With what results?  The delinquency rate goes steadily up and up.  No wonder.  Words about sibling rivalry and hell and the personality of Jesus are no substitutes for biochemistry.  A year in jail won't cure a Peter Pan of his endocrine disbalance or help the ex-Peter Pan to get rid of its psychological consequences.  For Peter-Pan delinquency what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals.  Given a tolerable environment, the result will be sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months.  Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn't been the faintest possibility, of eventual prajnaparamita and karuna, eventual wisdom and compassion.  And now get Vijaya to tell you about the Muscle People.  As you may perhaps have observed, he's one of them."  Leaning forward, Dr Robert thumped the giant's broad back.  "Solid beef!"  And he added, "How lucky for us poor shrimps that the animal isn't savage."

      Vijaya took one hand off the wheel, beat his chest and uttered a loud ferocious roar.  "Don't tease the gorilla," he said, and laughed good-humouredly.  Then, think of the other great dictator," he said to Will, "think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.  Hitler's the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan.  Stalin's the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man.  Predestined, by his shape, to be an extrovert.  Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extrovert who pine for indiscriminate togetherness.  No - the trampling, driving extrovert, the one who always feel impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility.  In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too apt to abuse it.  But the advice came too late.  Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldn't be ousted.  Ten years later his power was absolute.  Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off.  Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cosy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men.  And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory.  Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable.  And in the last phase of the War, compare Stalin's strategy with Hitler's.  Cool calculation pitted against compensatory day-dreams, clear-eyed realism against the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing.  Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency.  Peter Pans are wonderfully good at starting wars and revolutions; but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion.  Here's the jungle," Vijaya added in another tone, waving a hand in the direction of a great cliff of trees that seemed to block their further ascent.

      A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage.  Creepers dangled from the over-arching branches, and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar.  The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay.  Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw.  The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine.  They had entered a clearing in the forest.  Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree.  In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance.  Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron cauldron.  Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.

      "Old friends," said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese.  The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands.  Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.

      "Talk of Muscle Men," said Will as they left the clearing.  "Those were really splendid specimens."

      "That kind of physique," said Vijaya, "is a standing temptation.  And yet among all these men - and I've worked with scores of them - I've never met a single bully, a single potentially-dangerous power-lover."

      "Which is just another way," Murugan broke in contemptuously, "that nobody here has any ambition."

      "What's the explanation?" Will asked.

      "Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned.  They're never given a chance to work up an appetite for power.  We cure them of their delinquency before it's had time to develop.  But the Muscle Men are different.  They're just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extroverted, as they are with you.  So why don't they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at least in domestic tyrants?  First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale.  Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence.  This means that they always have an alternative - innumerable alternatives - to the pleasure of being the boss.  And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations.  We canalize this love of power and we deflect it - turn it away from people and on to things.  We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform - strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination - but satisfy it at nobody's expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful."

      "So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people - is that it?"

      "Precisely.  And when they've had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies."

      Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.

      "What's the joke?"

      "I was thinking of my father.  A little wood chopping might have been the making of him - not to mention the salvation of his wretched family.  Unfortunately he was an English gentleman.  Wood chopping was out of the question."

      "Didn't he have any physical outlet for his energies?"

      Will shook his head.  "Besides being a gentleman," he explained, "my father thought he was an intellectual.  But an intellectual doesn't hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks.  Apart from brandy, my father's only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics.  He fancied himself as a twentieth-century version of Lord Acton - the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism.  You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent State!  'Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Absolutely.'  After which he down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favourite pastime - trampling on his wife and children."

      "And if Acton himself didn't behave in that way," said Dr Robert, "it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent.  There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on.  That was Acton's fatal weakness.  As a political psychologist he was almost non-existent.  He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion.  But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament.  Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that's obvious.  But it's also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level.  On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood.  If I can ever find the time, I'd like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics, and law."

      "Law," Will echoed.  "I was just going to ask you about law.  Are you completely swordless and punishmentless?  Or do you still need judges and policemen?"

      "We still need them," said Dr Robert.  "But we don't need nearly so many of them as you do.  In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don't commit many crimes.  And in the second place most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal's MAC.  Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent.  And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of moksha-medicine experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight."

      "So where do the judges come in?"

      "The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he's guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts.  At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge.  When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed."

      "And if they're never satisfactory?"

      In the long run," said Dr Robert, "they always are."

      There was a silence.

      "Did you ever do any rock climbing?" Vijaya suddenly asked.

      Will laughed.  "How do you think I came by my game leg?"

      "That was forced climbing.  Did you ever climb for fun?"

      "Enough," said Will, "to convince me that I wasn't much good at it."

      Vijaya glanced at Murugan.  "What about you, while you were in Switzerland?"

      The boy blushed deeply and shook his head.  "You can't do any of those things he muttered, "if you have a tendency to TB."

      "What a pity!" said Vijaya.  "It would have been so good for you."

      Will asked, "Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?"

      "Climbing's an integral part of the school curriculum."

      "For everybody?"

      "A little for everybody.  With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People - that's about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls.  We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb."

      The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles.  There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool.  Dr Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the centre of the plateau.

      "That's the High Altitude Station," he said, "seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe.  Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won't set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots.  Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude - including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of."

      "Is this the place we're bound for?" Will asked.

      "No, we're going higher."  Dr Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle, and, on the other, mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the clouds.  "Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox.  It's one of my favourite places in the whole island.  When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week.  How many years ago!"  A note of sadness had come into his voice.  He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.

      They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.

      "Entering the last, worst lap," said Vijaya.  "Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel."

      He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible.  Ten minutes later they had arrived.