Island

"Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive suggestion, it all came true. When the Raja woke up for his evening meal, he found his wife sitting by his bed. 'We have a grandson,' she said, 'and our daughter is well. Dr. Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried to her room, to give them both your blessing.' At the end of a month the Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers. Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the Rani was convinced of it) his daughter's life as well, with Dr. Andrew as his chief adviser."

"So he didn't go back to Madras?"

"Not to Madras. Not even to London. He stayed here in Pala."

"Trying to change the Raja's accent?"

"And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja's kingdom."

"Into what?"

"That was a question he couldn't have answered. In those early days he had no plan—only a set of likes and dislikes. There were things about Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn't like at all. Things about Europe that he detested, and things he passionately approved of. Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and things that filled him with disgust. People, he was begi

"And did they find an answer?"

"Looking back," said Dr. MacPhail, "one's amazed by what those two men accomplished. The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist-what a strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other's deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other's native capacities. The Raja's was an acute and subtle mind; but he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European ways of thinking. No less intelligent, Dr. Andrew knew nothing, of course, about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy. He also knew nothing, as he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art of living. In the months that followed the operation each became the other's pupil and the other's teacher. And of course that was only a begi

" 'If the fool would persist in his folly,' " Will quoted from The Proverbs of Hell, " 'he would become wise.' "

"Precisely," Dr. Robert agreed. "And the most extravagant folly of all is the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr. Andrew were now contemplating-the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell and heaven. But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an enormous reward! Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently. Stupid fools get nowhere; it's only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly can make them wise or produce good results. Fortunately these two fools were clever. Clever enough, for example, to embark on their folly in a modest and appealing way. They began with pain relievers. The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself-and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached-and you live in peace. 'I show you sorrow,' the Buddha had said, 'and I show you the ending of sorrow.' Well, here was Dr. Andrew with a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one kind of sorrow, namely, physical pain. With the Raja himself or, for the women, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr. Andrew gave lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of teachers, mothers, invalids.

Painless childbirth-and forthwith all the women of Pala were enthusiastically on the side of the i

"Where did they go from pain?" Will asked.

"To agriculture and language. To bread and communication. They got a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they set to work to give the Palanese a second language. Pala was to remain a forbidden island; for Dr. Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that missionaries, planters and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated. But, while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the natives must somehow be helped to get out-if not physically, at least with their minds. But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi alphabet were a prison without windows. There could be no escape for them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and could read the Latin script. Among the courtiers, the Raja's linguistic accomplishments had already set a fashion. Ladies and gentlemen larded their conversation with scraps of Cockney, and some of them had even sent to Ceylon for English-speaking tutors. What had been a mode was now transformed into a policy. English schools were set up and a staff of Bengali printers, with their presses and their fonts of Caslon and Bodoni, were imported from Calcutta. The first English book to be published at Shivapuram was a selection from The Arabian Nights, the second, a translation of The Diamond Sutra, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in manuscript. For those who wished to read about Sindbad and Marouf, and for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there were now two cogent reasons for learning English.

That was the begi