6i
perpetually realise themselves afresh in all the
detail of existence, and all life and action are
enveloped in a pervading spiritual atmosphere."
This, I venture to say, is literally true of Sir
Nizamat Jung himself. He had read much and
thought much and felt much as a sojourner in life,
"Loiterer on life's common way " he calls himself,
in one of his poems, but he had always endeavoured
to look for the permanent beyond the changing
scenes of life's common way. And a sympathetic
observer could see how his vision of life was
gradually drifting away from its earlier speculative
and philosophic interests and associations of
aesthetic beauty to the stern realities of man's
precarious existence on this earth, as presented by
the sandy deserts of Arabia. Whatever we like
to call it, let us not forget that it was a passing from
the unreal to the real; and serious work had thus
become all the more a necessity to him to satisfy
his aspirations.
" When soon after his retirement, Nizamat
Jung started on a pilgrimage to Mecca /' wrote
one of his constant visitors, " some people des-
cribed it as a metamorphosis, but the change, if
such it could be called, was just a logical culmina-
tion of the inner forces that had been working in
his mind from the time when in his Cambridge
days, he had borrowed a life of the Greek* Philo-
sophers from the late Jam Sahib of Nawanagar—
the famous Ranji, a close friend—and had not
put it by until he had steeped himself inJSocrates.
That marked the beginning of his absorption in