One of the spectators, near whom I was standing, saw me start. In a
whisper, he explained to me the apparition of the three figures on the
platform of rock.
They were Brahmins (he said) who had forfeited their caste in the
service of the god. The god had commanded that their purification should
be the purification by pilgrimage. On that night, the three men were to
part. In three separate directions, they were to set forth as pilgrims
to the shrines of India. Never more were they to look on each other's
faces. Never more were they to rest on their wanderings, from the day
which witnessed their separation, to the day which witnessed their
death.
As those words were whispered to me, the plaintive music ceased. The
three men prostrated themselves on the rock, before the curtain which
hid the shrine. They rose--they looked on one another--they embraced.
Then they descended separately among the people. The people made way
for them in dead silence. In three different directions I saw the crowd
part, at one and the same moment. Slowly the grand white mass of the
people closed together again. The track of the doomed men through the
ranks of their fellow mortals was obliterated. We saw them no more.
A new strain of music, loud and jubilant, rose from the hidden shrine.
The crowd around me shuddered, and pressed together.
The curtain between the trees was drawn aside, and the shrine was
disclosed to view.
There, raised high on a throne--seated on his typical antelope, with
his four arms stretching towards the four corners of the earth--there,
soared above us, dark and awful in the mystic light of heaven, the god
of the Moon. And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow
Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom
of a woman's dress!
Yes! after the lapse of eight centuries, the Moonstone looks forth once
more, over the walls of the sacred city in which its story first began.
How it has found its way back to its wild native land--by what accident,
or by what crime, the Indians regained possession of their sacred gem,
may be in your knowledge, but is not in mine. You have lost sight of it
in England, and (if I know anything of this people) you have lost sight
of it for ever.
So the years pass, and repeat each other; so the same events revolve in
the cycles of time. What will be the next adventures of the Moonstone?
Who can tell?