Ch. 11: The City of Dreadful Night - Page 2

woman's arm showed for an instant above the
parapet, twined itself round the lean little neck, and the child was
dragged back, protesting, to the shelter of the bedstead. His thin,
high-pitched shriek died out in the thick air almost as soon as it was
raised; for even the children of the soil found it too hot to weep.

More corpses; more stretches of moonlit, white road, a string of
sleeping camels at rest by the wayside; a vision of scudding jackals;
ekka-ponies asleep--the harness still on their backs, and the brass-
studded country carts, winking in the moonlight--and again more corpses.
Wherever a grain cart atilt, a tree trunk, a sawn log, a couple of
bamboos and a few handfuls of thatch cast a shadow, the ground is
covered with them. They lie--some face downwards, arms folded, in the
dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up
dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the grain
carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glare
of the Moon. It would be a comfort if they were only given to snoring;
but they are not, and the likeness to corpses is unbroken in all
respects save one. The lean dogs snuff at them and turn away. Here and
there a tiny child lies on his father's bedstead, and a protecting arm
is thrown round it in every instance. But, for the most part, the
children sleep with their mothers on the house-tops. Yellow-skinned
white-toothed pariahs are not to be trusted within reach of brown
bodies.

A stifling hot blast from the mouth of the Delhi Gate nearly ends my
resolution of entering the City of Dreadful Night at this hour. It is a
compound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city
can brew in a day and a night. The temperature within the motionless
groves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly
by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within
the city to-night! The high house-walls are still radiating heat
savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to
poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are
parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their
ponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer's shops
and to blow thereon like grampuses.

Then silence follows--the silence that is full of the night noises of a
great city. A stringed instrument of some kind is just, and only just,
audible. High overhead some one throws open a window, and the rattle of
the wood-work echoes down the empty street. On one of the roofs, a
hookah is in full blast; and the men are talking softly as the pipe
gutters. A little farther on, the noise of conversation is more
distinct. A slit of