Dawn had not yet broken over the mountains. The sky was the colour of cold ash, and the great peaks of the Himalaya stood silent, white and unmoving, as they had stood for ten thousand years.

On a flat grey rock above a frozen stream sat an old rishi, wrapped in a thin deerskin, perfectly still. His name was so old that people had forgotten it; they only called him the One Who Sits.

A young woodcutter named Hema, climbing the slope before sunrise to gather fallen branches, came upon him and stopped. He had seen great offerings in his village — the priests lighting roaring fires, pouring ghee and grain into the flames, chanting long hymns while the smoke rose for hours. Surely, he thought, that was how you reached the gods.

But this old man had no fire. No grain. No smoke. Nothing at all.

Hema crept closer and listened. The rishi's lips were barely moving. From them came one sound, soft as breath, over and over, so quiet it was almost part of the silence itself.

"Om... Om... Om..."

Just one word. The shortest word there is. A single syllable.

Hema waited a long time, and at last the rishi opened his eyes.

"Grandfather," Hema whispered, "where is your offering? Where is your fire?"

The old man smiled. "The biggest fire burns out by midday," he said. "But this small word never goes out. Of all the words there are, the wise found that one holds them all — Om, the sound the whole universe hums. And of all the offerings, the priests with their great fires are mighty indeed. But the quietest offering, just this word said again and again from a still heart, rises higher than any smoke."

He gestured to the peaks around them, vast and white and utterly silent.

"Look at the mountains. They do nothing. They do not move, they do not speak, they make no smoke. And yet they are the greatest of all standing things, and the gods themselves are said to dwell on them. Stillness, child, is not emptiness. The Himalaya is full."

Hema set down his bundle of branches. The sun touched the highest peak and turned it to gold, and somewhere very quietly, beneath his own breath, he found that he had already begun to say it too.

"Om."