The priest rose at the Captain's entrance. He was a fine specimen of
the true Brahmin, the intellectual cult, that through successive
generations of mental sway and homage from the millions of untutored
ones had become conscious of its power. Tall, spare of form, with wide
high forehead and full expressive eyes, almost olive skin, Barlow felt
that the Swami was quite unlike the begging yogis and mendicants; a man
who was by the close alliance of his intellect to the essence of
created things a Sannyasi. Larger in his conceptions than the yogis
who misconstrued the Vedas and the Law of Manu as imposing an
association of filth--smeared ashes, and uncombed, uncleansed hair--as
a symbol of piety and abnegation of spirit, a visible assertion that
the body had passed from regard--that it, with its sensualities and
ungodly cravings, had become subservient to the spirit, the soul.

Swami Sarasvati was austere; Barlow felt that he dwelt on a plane where
the trivialities of life were but pestilential insects, to be endured
stoically in a physical way, with the mind freed from their irritation
grasping grander things; life was a wheel that revolved with the
certainty of celestial bodies.

It was so curious, and yet so unfailing, that Bootea, with her
hyper-intuition should have found, selected this spiritual tutor from
the horde of gurus, byragies, and yogis that were connecting links
between the tremendous pantheon of grotesque gods and the common
people. Here she had come to an intellectual, though no doubt an
ascetic; one possessed of fierce fervour in his ministry. There would
be no swaying of that will force developed to the keen flexible
unflawed temper of a Damascus blade.