Savitri

   IV

'The Quest'

      From the shelter of her parents' home and city, Savitri loses herself in the wide world's unchartered ways, and feels dazzled by the unfolding panorama of "new brilliant scenes" and divers soil and country, clans and peoples. She is a part of all she meets, the very stars and winds are her dear comrades, and she feels sometimes as though she is but tracing "again a journey often made". She sees and remembers, or she remembers and sees, and from her silent heights she can peer through the dim play of appearance. She sees multi-foliate Nature and million-hued humanity, and winds her way through the still untravelled world:

Her carven chariot with its fretted wheels

Threaded through clamorous marts and sentinel towers

Past figured gates and high dream-sculptured fronts

And gardens hung in the sapphire of the skies,

Pillared assembly halls with armoured guards,...¹⁷⁴

Not populous far-famed cities only but the humbler haunts of common folk also draw Savitri's attention and affectionate gaze. The virgin silences of unfrequented hills and valleys have a deep purpose of their own for it is there the great Creatrix nurses "her symbol mysteries" and guards for "her pure-eyed sacraments":

The valley clefts between her breasts of joy,

Her mountain altars for the fires of dawn

 And nuptial beaches where the ocean couched

And the huge chanting of her prophet woods.¹⁷⁵

      Deep in the woods' recesses are the hermitages of the wise, and Savitri visits them too and studies the lives of the "strong king-sages" and their "young grave disciples". They are not as other men, but live "immaculate in tranquil heights of self"; and their ministry makes their neophytes "comrades of the cosmic urge/No longer chained to their small separate selves".¹⁷⁶ They are masters of knowledge, and "vessels of the cosmic Force"; they are pacifiers and harmonisers, and they are the healers of the "hard and wounded world". And when they lisp in numbers, they sing "Infinity's names and deathless powers/In metres that reflect the moving worlds".¹⁷⁷ Active or

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passive, in speech or in silence, in creation or in contemplation, these wise children of the forest help the world in its toils and guard and extend the immaculate treasures of the spirit.

      As Savitri glides in and out of these hermitages and haunts of the wise, her sensibilities are quickened still further and she feels "the kinship of eternal calm". Yet her quest keeps her moving on and on, for she is yet to find what she has set out to seek. She calls the Powers to her help, and hopes that she may not be "overwhelmed by the immensity" of the world stretching before her. Still Nature lures her on, still she wanders, gazes, communes; the crickets' cry rings in her ears, the serpentine road seems an endless coil; the desert sands are bleak, the jungle voices are eerie; yet she will persevere in her quest, however hard the earth and torridly oppressive the sky:

      The months had fed the passion of the sun

      And now his burning breath assailed the soil.

      The tiger heats prowled through the fainting earth;

      All was licked up as by a lolling tongue.

      The spring winds failed; the sky was set like bronze.¹⁷⁸

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