Chapter 38 - Page 2

carriages, are
great groups of comfortably-off Parsee women--perfect flower-beds of
brilliant color, a fascinating spectacle. Tramp, tramp, tramping along
the road, in singles, couples, groups, and gangs, you have the
working-man and the working-woman--but not clothed like ours. Usually
the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his
loin-handkerchief; his color a deep dark brown, his skin satin, his
rounded muscles knobbing it as if it had eggs under it. Usually the
woman is a slender and shapely creature, as erect as a lightning-rod, and
she has but one thing on--a bright-colored piece of stuff which is wound
about her head and her body down nearly half-way to her knees, and which
clings like her own skin. Her legs and feet are bare, and so are her
arms, except for her fanciful bunches of loose silver rings on her ankles
and on her arms. She has jewelry bunched on the side of her nose also,
and showy clusterings on her toes. When she undresses for bed she takes
off her jewelry, I suppose. If she took off anything more she would
catch cold. As a rule she has a large shiney brass water jar of graceful
shape on her head, and one of her naked arms curves up and the hand holds
it there. She is so straight, so erect, and she steps with such style,
and such easy grace and dignity; and her curved arm and her brazen jar
are such a help to the picture indeed, our working-women cannot begin
with her as a road-decoration.

It is all color, bewitching color, enchanting color--everywhere all
around--all the way around the curving great opaline bay clear to
Government House, where the turbaned big native 'chuprassies' stand
grouped in state at the door in their robes of fiery red, and do most
properly and stunningly finish up the splendid show and make it
theatrically complete. I wish I were a 'chuprassy'.

This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth
and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of
famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers
and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations
and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods,
cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history,
grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays
bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations--the
one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable
interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant,
wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men
desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give
that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the