CHAPTER XVH
-      -	TAXILA —I
THE PAST SPEAKS
" Where there is no knowledge of the past,
There is no vision of the future."
— Rafael Sabltini
The past Is always before us. Again and again, in the
endless spiral of human progress, we look down from
different heights upon the same familiar milestones.
" Trembling at that at which we stood before"
Those below provide the key to those that lie ahead.
The substance is the same, the context is different. It only
needs humility and receptivity of mind to unlock the
secret. To stand, for instance, on top of Mount Pisagh, like
Fielding King Hall, a thousand feet above the north-
ern entrance to the Khyber, and look across eighty miles
into Afghanistan up the Kabul river valley, Is to hear the
foot-falls of two thousand years. And what a tale of
human tragedy, glamour and wild romance they unfold!
Gandhiji rounded off his tour of the Frontier Province
by a visit to the ruins of Taxila before entraining at the
railway station of that name for Wardha — and most ap-
propriately, too. Indeed, the tour of the Frontier Province
would have been incomplete without it. If four weeks of
the closest communion with Badshah Khan and his Khudai
Khidmatgars were needed to bring home the fact that the
non-violence movement of the Khudai Khidmatgars Is
not a mere excrescence of a temporary and passing phase,
but is an organic development answering an inner neces-
sity of their social existence, it needed a visit to Taxila
to dispel another notion which Is all but universal about
the Pathans. It has been remarked by sceptics that non-
violence is at best an exotic growth in the North-West
Frontier Province with but little chance of flourishing
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