I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist—long have I been on the way.
I hear dull rasping whispers afloat on the night:
Are they spirits conferring, friendly to me and my journey, or the half-smothered mockeries of the fiends that I know—that I know?—
They that sneer and pass on the winds in the night.
I travel toward a Shrine that is set in a mist—
By day I am beset by the beasts of my nethers and awed by the old bleached cadavers that strew the intricate alleys of vision.
I peer at you, O glutton, well-fed, nigger-hipped, bag-eyed; at you I am peering,
And wonder whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of your belly—
Wondering whether the Truth be not a belch and a leer and a lusty young wench.
And I peer at you, too, O Gautama, the purpled renunciant, great Shadow-Eater:
I peer at you there on the roadside, where you sit ‘neath the Bo tree, motionless, graven as death, solved in thy pulseless Nirvana—
Wondering whether the Shrine is hid in the mists of they brain.
Am I mocked? Am I followed? Who goes there? Hands off! thou Vile Thing!
Thou knowest not me nor the thing that I seek:
The Shrine that is set in a mist—over THERE, just BEYOND.