More corpses; more stretches of moonlit, white road; a string of
sleeping camels at rest by the wayside; a vision of scudding jackals;
_ekka_-ponies asleep—the harness still on their backs, and the
brass-studded country carts, winking in the moonlight—and again more
corpses. wherever a grain cart atilt, a tree trunk, a sawn log, a couple
of bamboos and a few handfuls of thatch cast a shadow, the ground is
covered with them. They lie—some face downwards, arms folded, in the
dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up
dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the
grain-carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full
glare of the Moon. It would be a comfort if they were only given to
snoring; but they are not, and the likeness to corpses is unbroken in
all respects save one. The lean dogs snuff at them and turn away. Here
and there a tiny child lies on his father’s bedstead, and a protecting
arm is thrown round it in every instance. But, for the most part, the
children sleep with their mothers on the housetops. Yellow-skinned,
white-toothed pariahs are not to be trusted within reach of brown
bodies.
A stifling hot blast from the mouth of the Delhi Gate nearly ends my
resolution of entering the City of Dreadful Night at this hour. It is a
compound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city
can brew in a day and a night. The temperature within the motionless
groves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly
by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within
the city to-night! The high house-walls are still radiating heat
savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to
poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are
parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their
ponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer’s shop,
and to blow thereon like grampuses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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