A PILGRIM'S DIARY 83

and delightful it would be to fill the court at nightfall
with a crowd of villagers, for a magic-lantern lecture.
or a Mahabharata katha-katha I A party of Bengali
students did something of the sort a few years ago,
headed by the monk Sadananda, and the auditors
came, I have heard, from twelve and fifteen miles,
to enjoy the treat.

The pre-historic elements of Hinduism are not
missing from even this cursory glimpse of the
Himalayas. There has been a definite Mahabharata
period when the whole culture-energy of the region
seems to have been devoted to dramatising and
appropriating the heroes and incidents of the great
epic. There is a little river called Vyasa-Ganga,
upon whose banks stands a tiny chapel containing
an image of Vyasa 1 And beyond its boundary lie
practically all the associations of the five Pandavas,
ending in the great snowy road of the Mahaprasthana
at Kedar Nath itself. Could evidence have been
clearer that there was once an attempt, definite,
deliberate, and literary, to impose the ideas of the
national epic on an Himalayan kingdom, of which
perhaps this particular river was the frontier, and to
parcel it out into a sort of Mahabharata holy land?
At Kathgodam, the Pandavas are said to have begun
their last pilgrimage, and their road leads us past
Bhim Tal, or the lake of Bhima, and past Dhari, their
treasury, while the ice-scratches on the rock at Devi
Dhura are said to mark the place of their pachisi"
board! The caves on the road to Kedar Nath are