（外文电子版资料）Smith, Clark Ashton - The Brahmins Wisdom.doc

The Brahmins Wisdom Clark Ashton Smith When the sun has sunk into her grave behind the hills, night after night a shriek of wild horror awakens and flees from the greedily gasping hands of the wind out of the jungle toward the monastery. Without lowering the voice, without raising it, without ever taking new breath, it yells, it shrieks, it screams through the jungle. It is the mask of Madhu, the Demon, the old, old, colossal mask, carved in stone, half swallowed by the swamps, the mask of Madhu, The Mad, shimmering white, staring with empty eyes out of the pools, out of the lonely, gurgling, rotting, ever murmuring pools, the monks rouned to each other. Pestilence and plague he heralds -- Madhu, The Demon -- Madhu, The Mad! And full of fear the Maharajah and his household fled to the North. When the Swamiji come, the holy pilgrims, for the feast of Bala Gopala and pass the monastery on their journey, we shall ask them what makes the mask of stone over there in the jungle scream and scream through the night, the hermits declared. And on the eve of Bala Gopala the Swamiji came moving along the glittering road, silent, their heads drooping, their eyes cast down, dressed in dismal, black monk-frocks ... like wandering corpses. Four men who had renounced the world .... Four men beyond virtue and vice .... Four men freed from all fetters .... The Swami Vivekananda from Trevandrum. The Swami Saradananda from Shambalva. The Swami Abhedananda from Maiavatiti. And a fourth one, an old, old man from the caste of the Brahmins, whose name no one knew anymore. And they entered the monastery in a controlled state of mind.