Chapter 42 - Page 2

or two sooner; still to a stranger twelve seems quite
young enough.

A while after midnight a couple of celebrated and high-priced
nautch-girls appeared in the gorgeous place, and danced and sang. With
them were men who played upon strange instruments which made uncanny
noises of a sort to make one's flesh creep. One of these instruments was
a pipe, and to its music the girls went through a performance which
represented snake charming. It seemed a doubtful sort of music to charm
anything with, but a native gentleman assured me that snakes like it and
will come out of their holes and listen to it with every evidence of
refreshment And gratitude. He said that at an entertainment in his
grounds once, the pipe brought out half a dozen snakes, and the music had
to be stopped before they would be persuaded to go. Nobody wanted their
company, for they were bold, familiar, and dangerous; but no one would
kill them, of course, for it is sinful for a Hindoo to kill any kind of a
creature.

We withdrew from the festivities at two in the morning. Another picture,
then--but it has lodged itself in my memory rather as a stage-scene than
as a reality. It is of a porch and short flight of steps crowded with
dark faces and ghostly-white draperies flooded with the strong glare from
the dazzling concentration of illuminations; and midway of the steps one
conspicuous figure for accent--a turbaned giant, with a name according to
his size: Rao Bahadur Baskirao Balinkanje Pitale, Vakeel to his Highness
the Gaikwar of Baroda. Without him the picture would not have been
complete; and if his name had been merely Smith, he wouldn't have
answered. Close at hand on house-fronts on both sides of the narrow
street were illuminations of a kind commonly employed by the natives
--scores of glass tumblers (containing tapers) fastened a few in inches
apart all over great latticed frames, forming starry constellations which
showed out vividly against their black back grounds. As we drew away
into the distance down the dim lanes the illuminations gathered together
into a single mass, and glowed out of the enveloping darkness like a sun.

Then again the deep silence, the skurrying rats, the dim forms stretched
every-where on the ground; and on either hand those open booths
counterfeiting sepulchres, with counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless
in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps. And now, a year later,
when I read the cablegrams I seem to be reading of what I myself partly
saw--saw before it happened--in a prophetic dream, as it were. One
cablegram says, "Business in the native town is about suspended. Except
the wailing and the tramp of the funerals. There is but little life or
movement. The closed shops exceed in number