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Every fiber of his being cried out against the division of his beloved country demanded by India's Moslem politicians, a division that many of its English rulers were now ready to
    accept. India's people and faiths were, for Gandhi, as inextricably interwoven as the intricate patterns of an Oriental carpet. India could no more be split up without destroying the essence of her being, he felt, than a carpet could be cut up without rupturing its pattern.
    "You shall have to divide my body before you divide India," he had proclaimed again and again.
    He had come to the devastated village of Srirampur in search of his own faith and to find a way to prevent the disease infecting it from engulfing all India. "I see no light through the impenetrable darkness," he had cried in anguish as the first communal killings opened an abyss between India's Hindu and Moslem communities. "Truth and nonviolence which I swear by and which have sustained me for fifty years seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them. ...
    "I have come here," he told his followers, "to discover a new technique and test the soundness of the doctrine which has sustained me and made my life worth living."
    For days, Gandhi wandered through the village, talking to its inhabitants, meditating, waiting for the counsel of the "inner voice," which had so often illuminated the way for him in times of crisis. Recently, his acolytes had noticed, he had been spending more and more time in a curious occupation: practicing crossing the slippery, rickety log bridges surrounding the village.
    New Year's Day when he had finished his mudpack, he called his followers to his hut. His inner voice had spoken at last. As once ancient Hindu holymen had crossed their continent in barefoot pilgrimages to its sacred shrines, so he was going to set out on a Pilgrimage of Penance to the hate-wasted villages of Noakhali. In the next seven weeks, walking barefoot as a sign of his penitence, he would cover 116 miles visiting forty-seven of Noakhali's villages.
    He, a Hindu, would go among those enraged Moslems, moving from village to village, from hut to hut seeking to restore with the poultice of his presence Noakhali's shattered peace.
    Because this was a pilgrimage of penance, he said, he wanted no other companion but God. Only four of his followers would accompany him, living on whatever charity the inhabitants of the villages they visited were ready to offer them. Let the politicians of his Congress Party and the Moslem League wrangle over India's future in their
    endless Delhi debates, he said. It was, as it always had been, in India's villages that the answers to her problems would have to be found. This, he said, would be his "last and greatest experiment." If he could "rekindle the lamp of neighborliness," in those villages cursed by blood and bitterness, their example might inspire the whole nation. Here in Noakhali, he prayed, he could set alight again the torch of nonviolence to conjure away the specters of communal violence and division haunting India.
    His party set out at sunup. Gandhi's pretty nineteen-year-old grandniece Manu had put together his Spartan kit: a pen and paper, a needle and thread, an earthen bowl and a wooden spoon, his spinning wheel and his three gurus, a little ivory representation of the three monkeys who "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil." She also packed in a cotton sack the books that reflected the eclecticism of the man marching into the jungle: the Bhagavad-Gita, a Koran, the Practice and Precepts of Jesus, and a book of Jewish Thoughts.
    With Gandhi at their head, the little band marched over the dirt paths, past the ponds and groves of betel and coconut palms to the rice paddies beyond. The villagers of Srirampur rushed for a last glimpse of this bent seventy-seven-year-old man striding off with his bamboo stave in search of a lost dream.
    As Gandhi's party began to move out of sight across the harvested paddies, the villagers heard