Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 5 — John Shaqi
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 5Twain, Mark
General
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. Part 5
Twain, Mark
Equator -- Description and travel; Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 -- Travel; Voyages around the world
He remained half an hour, and I found him a most courteous and charming
gentleman. The godship has been in his family a good while, but I do not
know how long. He is a Mohammedan deity; by earthly rank he is a prince;
not an Indian but a Persian prince. He is a direct descendant of the
Prophet's line. He is comely; also young--for a god; not forty, perhaps
not above thirty-five years old. He wears his immense honors with
tranquil brace, and with a dignity proper to his awful calling. He
speaks English with the ease and purity of a person born to it. I think
I am not overstating this. He was the only god I had ever seen, and I
was very favorably impressed. When he rose to say good-bye, the door
swung open and I caught the flash of a red fez, and heard these words,
reverently said--
"Satan see God out?"
"Yes." And these mis-mated Beings passed from view Satan in the lead and
The Other following after.
CHAPTER XL.
Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
The next picture in my mind is Government House, on Malabar Point, with
the wide sea-view from the windows and broad balconies; abode of His
Excellency the Governor of the Bombay Presidency--a residence which is
European in everything but the native guards and servants, and is a home
and a palace of state harmoniously combined.
That was England, the English power, the English civilization, the modern
civilization--with the quiet elegancies and quiet colors and quiet tastes
and quiet dignity that are the outcome of the modern cultivation. And
following it came a picture of the ancient civilization of India--an hour
in the mansion of a native prince: Kumar Schri Samatsinhji Bahadur of the
Palitana State.
The young lad, his heir, was with the prince; also, the lad's sister, a
wee brown sprite, very pretty, very serious, very winning, delicately
moulded, costumed like the daintiest butterfly, a dear little fairyland
princess, gravely willing to be friendly with the strangers, but in the
beginning preferring to hold her father's hand until she could take stock
of them and determine how far they were to be trusted. She must have
been eight years old; so in the natural (Indian) order of things she
would be a bride in three or four years from now, and then this free
contact with the sun and the air and the other belongings of out-door
nature and comradeship with visiting male folk would end, and she would
shut herself up in the zenana for life, like her mother, and by inherited
habit of mind would be happy in that seclusion and not look upon it as an
irksome restraint and a weary captivity.
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