As we crossed the great esplanade to the north of the Fort--Bhima
Gandharva and I--and strolled along the noisy streets, I began to
withdraw my complaint. It was not like Jonesville. It was not like any
one place or thing, but like a hundred, and all the hundred _outre_
to the last degree. Hindu beggars, so dirty that they seemed to have
returned to dust before death; three fakirs, armed with round-bladed
daggers with which they were wounding themselves apparently in the
most reckless manner, so as to send streams of blood flowing to the
ground, and redly tattooing the ashes with which their naked bodies
were covered; Parsees with their long noses curving over their
moustaches, clothed in white, sending one's thoughts back to Ormuz,
to Persia, to Zoroaster, to fire-worship and to the strangeness of the
fate which drove them out of Persia more than a thousand years ago,
and which has turned them into the most industrious traders and
most influential citizens of a land in which they are still exiles;
Chinese, Afghans--the Highlanders of the East--Arabs, Africans,
Mahrattas, Malays, Persians, Portuguese half-bloods; men that called
upon Mohammed, men that called upon Confucius, upon Krishna, upon
Christ, upon Gotama the Buddha, upon Rama and Sita, upon Brahma, upon
Zoroaster; strange carriages shaded by red domes that compressed
a whole dream of the East in small, and drawn by humped oxen,
alternating with palanquins, with stylish turnouts of the latest mode,
with cavaliers upon Arabian horses; half-naked workmen, crouched
in uncomfortable workshops and ornamenting sandal-wood boxes; dusky
curb-stone shopkeepers, rushing at me with strenuous offerings of
their wares; lines of low shop-counters along the street, backed by
houses rising in many stories, whose black pillared verandahs
were curiously carved and painted: cries, chafferings, bickerings,
Mussulman prayers, Arab oaths extending from "Praise God that you
exist" to "Praise God _although_ you exist;"--all these things
appealed to the confused senses.
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