From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
as monstrous as anything in Dore's illustrations of the _Contes
Drolatiques_ and, wherever it wanders, the eye comes back at last to its
fantastic bulk. There is no greenery on the rock, nothing but fierce
sunlight or black shadow. A line of red hills forms the background of
the city, and this is as bare as the picked bones of camels that lie
bleaching on the sand below.
Wherever the eye falls, it sees a camel or a string of camels--lean,
racer-built _sowarri_ camels, or heavy, black, shag-haired trading ships
bent on their way to the Railway Station. Through the night the air is
alive with the bubbling and howling of the brutes, who assuredly must
suffer from nightmare. In the morning the chorus round the station is
deafening.
Knowing what these camels meant, but trusting nevertheless that the road
would not be _very_ bad, the Englishman went into the city, left a
well-kunkered road, turned through a sand-worn, red sandstone gate, and
sank ankle-deep in fine reddish white sand. This was the main
thoroughfare of the city. Two tame lynxes shared it with a donkey; and
the rest of the population seemed to have gone to bed. In the hot
weather, between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon all
Jodhpur stays at home for fear of death by sun-stroke, and it is
possible that the habit extends far into what is officially called the
"cold weather"; or, perhaps, being brought up among sands, men do not
care to tramp them for pleasure. The city internally is a walled and
secret place; each courtyard being hidden from view by a red sandstone
wall except in a few streets where the shops are poor and mean.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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