Chapter 42

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others--his
last breath.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Toward midnight, that night, there was another function. This was a
Hindoo wedding--no, I think it was a betrothal ceremony. Always before,
we had driven through streets that were multitudinous and tumultuous with
picturesque native life, but now there was nothing of that. We seemed to
move through a city of the dead. There was hardly a suggestion of life
in those still and vacant streets. Even the crows were silent. But
everywhere on the ground lay sleeping natives-hundreds and hundreds.
They lay stretched at full length and tightly wrapped in blankets, beads
and all. Their attitude and their rigidity counterfeited death. The
plague was not in Bombay then, but it is devastating the city now. The
shops are deserted, now, half of the people have fled, and of the
remainder the smitten perish by shoals every day. No doubt the city
looks now in the daytime as it looked then at night. When we had pierced
deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes, we
had to go carefully, for men were stretched asleep all about and there
was hardly room to drive between them. And every now and then a swarm of
rats would scamper across past the horses' feet in the vague light--the
forbears of the rats that are carrying the plague from house to house in
Bombay now. The shops were but sheds, little booths open to the street;
and the goods had been removed, and on the counters families were
sleeping, usually with an oil lamp present. Recurrent dead watches, it
looked like.

But at last we turned a corner and saw a great glare of light ahead. It
was the home of the bride, wrapped in a perfect conflagration of
illuminations,--mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the
occasion. Within was abundance of brilliancy--flames, costumes, colors,
decorations, mirrors--it was another Aladdin show.

The bride was a trim and comely little thing of twelve years, dressed as
we would dress a boy, though more expensively than we should do it, of
course. She moved about very much at her ease, and stopped and talked
with the guests and allowed her wedding jewelry to be examined. It was
very fine. Particularly a rope of great diamonds, a lovely thing to look
at and handle. It had a great emerald hanging to it.

The bridegroom was not present. He was having betrothal festivities of
his own at his father's house. As I understood it, he and the bride were
to entertain company every night and nearly all night for a week or more,
then get married, if alive. Both of the children were a little elderly,
as brides and grooms go, in India--twelve; they ought to have been
married a year