High up where the air is thin and cold, there is a place called Hemkunt. It means the lake of ice.
All around it stand mountains, and seven of them rise higher than the rest, with tops of ice that look like silver. Early in the morning the moon goes quietly away, and a gold light comes up from the east and touches those seven peaks one by one until the whole ring of them is shining.
In the middle, where the ground flattens out, lies the lake. And here is the strange thing about it. It sits in a place made of ice, and yet its water is not frozen, and not even as cold as you would think. It moves. A little stream runs out of it and goes down the mountain for miles until it joins a river far below.
There are caves in those rocks, and long ago people who wanted to think about the Lord came up and sat in them.
And on that mountain, long before Patna, there was someone sitting very still.
He had sat for so long, and eaten so little, that he was thin as a bundle of sticks. But you would not have felt sorry for him. His face shone. He had been sitting there, quiet, remembering the Lord, for longer than you or I can imagine.
Now I must tell you who was sitting there, because the whole sakhi is inside this one thing.
It was not a stranger. That light had been down to our earth already, nine times over, and each time people had seen a face and learned a name. The first time they had called him Guru Nanak Dev Ji. It was the same light every time after that, walking about in a new body, the way one lamp lights the next lamp and it is still the one flame that is burning.
So the one sitting up there on the ice was Guru Nanak Dev Ji, resting between one coming and the next.
One day the clouds came down thick, and the sun hid, and the whole mountain went silent. Not one sound anywhere.
And on that day his soul rose up and went all the way, the way a drop of water goes into the sea and is not a drop any more, and he met the Lord.
What happened there cannot be put into our words. But this much can be told.
The Lord said to him: Go down to the earth.
Go, and make people brave and good again. Be the kind of person I mean people to be, and then teach them to be that kind of person. My children were made upright, and they have bent themselves low. Give them strength. Love them the way a father loves.
And here is the part I like best. When he heard it, he was uneasy.
He had waited so long for this meeting, and now, on the very day it came, he was being sent away from it. And the work was so hard. He had been down nine times already and the work was still not done. How, he thought, will I manage?
But he knew that saying no to the Lord is not love at all. So he asked for one thing instead.
O Lord, he said, who am I to do this? If you will keep me joined to you the whole time I am down there, if this cord never breaks, if you will hold me up, then I am ready to go.
And the Lord answered him.
I am in you, and you are in me, and this meeting of ours will never end. I will hold you up, the way a father holds up his son. Whatever you do down there will be my own doing. You are my son, and I am your father.
It was noon by then. The sun was hot on the ice when he opened his eyes.
He sat a while longer in the cool wind. Then he remembered what he had been told, and looked down to see where he was being sent.
He saw a country where people were frightened, and nobody was teaching them anything. The strong were hard on the weak and told themselves it was holy. Everybody quarrelled, and nobody was looking after anybody else.
He looked at it all for a long time.
And then, for the tenth time, he got ready to come.