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him singing one of Rabindranath Tagore's great poems set to music. It was one of the old leader's favorites, and as he disappeared they followed the sound of his high-pitched, uneven voice drifting back across the paddies.
    "If they answer not your call," he sang, "walk alone, walk alone."
    The fraternal bloodshed that Gandhi hoped to check on his lonesome pilgrimage had for centuries rivaled hunger for the honor of being India's sternest curse. The great epic poem of Hinduism, the Mahabharata, celebrated an appalling civil slaughter on the plains of Kurukshetra, northwest of Delhi, 2,500 years before Christ. Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the north to wrest the subcontinent from its more ancient Dravidian inhabitants. Its sages had
    written their sacred Vedas on the banks of the Indus, centuries before Christ's birth.
    The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus' hold on the great Gangetic plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.
    The two great faiths thus planted on the subcontinent were as different as the manifestations of man's eternal vocation to believe could be. Where Islam reposed on a man, the Prophet, and a precise text, the Koran, Hinduism was a religion without a founder, a revealed truth, a dogma, a structured liturgy or a churchly establishment. For Islam, the Creator stood apart from his creation, ordering and presiding over his work. To the Hindu, the Creator and his creation were one and indivisible, and God was a kind of all-pervading cosmic spirit, to whose manifestations there would be no limit.
    The Hindu, as a result, worshiped God in almost any form he chose: in animals, ancestors, sages, spirits, natural forces, divine incarnations, the Absolute. He could find God manifested in snakes, phalluses, water, fire, the planets and stars.
    To the Moslem, on the contrary, there was but one God, Allah, and the Koran forbade the faithful to represent him in any shape or form. Idols and idolatry to the Moslem were abhorrent, paintings and statues blasphemous. A mosque was a spare, solemn place, in which the only decorations permitted were abstract designs and the repeated representation of the ninety-nine names of God.
    Idolatry was Hinduism's natural form of expression, and a Hindu temple was the exact opposite of a mosque. It was a kind of spiritual shopping center, a clutter of goddesses with snakes coiling from their heads, six-armed gods with fiery tongues, elephants with wings talking to the clouds, jovial little monkeys, dancing maidens and squat phallic symbols.
    Moslems worshiped in a body, prostrating themselves on the floor of the mosque in the direction of Mecca, chanting in unison their Koranic verses. A Hindu
    worshiped alone, with only his thoughts linking him and the god he could select from a bewildering pantheon of three to three and a half million divinities. At the core of this pantheon was a central trinity—Brahma, the Creator; Shiva, the Destroyer; Vishnu, the Preserver—positive, negative, neutral forces, eternally in search, as their worshipers were supposed to be, of the perfect equilibrium, the attainment of the Absolute. Behind them were gods and goddesses for the seasons, the weather, the crops, and the ailments of man, like Mariamman, the smallpox goddess revered each year in a ritual strikingly similar to the Jewish Passover.
    Hie greatest barrier to Hindu-Moslem understanding, however, was not metaphysical, but social. It was the system that ordered Hindu society, caste. According to Vedic scripture, caste originated with Brahma, the Creator. Brah-mans, the highest caste, sprang from his mouth; Kshatriyas, warriors and rulers, from his biceps;