________________
24 A Sadhu's Reminiscences of Ramana Maharshi special medicine or tonic were given to him he wanted to share it with everybody. “If it is good for me then it must be good for the rest,” he would argue and make them distribute it round the dining-hall. He would wander out on to the Hill a few times a day, and if any attachment to anything on earth could be said of him, it was surely an attachment to the Hill. He loved it and said it was God Himself.
He used to say that it was the top of the spiritual axis of the earth; there must, he said, be another mountain corresponding to Arunachala at exactly the opposite side of the globe, the corresponding pole of the axis. So certain was he of this that one evening he made me fetch an atlas and see if this was not correct. I found, according to the atlas, the exact opposite point came in the sea about an hundred miles off the coast of Peru. He seemed doubtful about this. I pointed out that there might be some island at this spot or a mountain under the sea. It was not until some years after Bhagavan's passing that a visiting Englishman had a tale of a spot, supposed to be a great secret power centre, in the Andes somewhere in this latitude. Later I found that though a centre had certainly been started it had failed. Since then I have been told of another person who is practising meditation in solitude in the region of the Andes in Ecuador. So it does appear as though there were some strange attraction about that part of the globe. The earth is not an exact sphere and maps are not so accurate as all that, so we are unable to pin it down to any definite point. It is quite possible that