India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
All that afternoon the heliograph winked and flickered on the hills,
striving to tell the good news to a mountain forty miles away. And in the
evening there arrived, dusty, sweating, and sore, a misguided
Correspondent who had gone out to assist at a trumpery village-burning and
who had read off the message from afar, cursing his luck the while.
"Let's have the details somehow--as full as ever you can, please. It's the
first time I've ever been left this campaign," said the Correspondent to
the Brigadier; and the Brigadier, nothing loath, told him how an Army of
Communication had been crumpled up, destroyed, and all but annihilated by
the craft, strategy, wisdom, and foresight of the Brigadier,
But some say, and among these be the Gurkhas who watched on the hillside,
that that battle was won by Jakin and Lew, whose little bodies were borne
up just in time to fit two gaps at the head of the big ditch-grave for the
dead under the heights of Jagai.
THE SENDING OF DANA DA
When the Devil rides on your chest remember the _chamar.--Native Proverb_.
Once upon a time, some people in India made a new Heaven and a new Earth
out of broken tea-cups, a missing brooch or two, and a hair-brush. These
were hidden under brushes, or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an
entire Civil Service of subordinate Gods used to find or mend them again;
and every one said: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are
dreamed of in our philosophy." Several other things happened also, but the
Religion never seemed to get much beyond its first manifestations; though
it added an air-line postal service, and orchestral effects in order to
keep abreast of the times, and choke off competition.
This Religion was too elastic for ordinary use. It stretched itself and
embraced pieces of everything that the medicine-men of all ages have
manufactured. It approved of and stole from Freemasonry; looted the
Latter-day Rosicrucians of half their pet words; took any fragments of
Egyptian philosophy that it found in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_;
annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or
English, and talked of all the rest; built in the German versions of what
is left of the Zend Avesta; encouraged White, Grey and Black Magic,
including spiritualism, palmistry, fortune-telling by cards, hot
chestnuts, double-kerneled nuts and tallow droppings; would have adopted
Voodoo and Oboe had it known anything about them, and showed itself, in
every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that had ever been
invented since the birth of the Sea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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