That night when the tales were all told and the guard, bless them, were snoring peaceably in the starlight, a man came stealthily into the enclosure of _kanats_ and woke the Englishman by muttering _Sahib_, _Sahib_ in his ear. It was no robber but some poor devil with a petition--a grimy, welted paper. He was absolutely unintelligible, and additionally so in that he stammered almost to dumbness. He stood by the bed, alternately bowing to the earth and standing erect, his arms spread aloft, and his whole body working as he tried to force out some rebellious word in a key that should not wake the men without. What could the Englishman do? He was no Government servant, and had no concern with _urzis_. It was laughable to lie in a warm bed and watch this unfortunate heathen, clicking and choking and gasping in his desperate desire to make the _Sahib_ understand. It was also unpleasantly pathetic, and the listener found himself as blindly striving to catch the meaning as the pleader to make himself comprehended. But it was no use; and in the end the man departed as he had come--bowed, abject, and unintelligible. Let every word written against Ganesh be rescinded. It was by his ordering that the Englishman saw such a dawn on the Burra Talao as he had never before set eyes on. Every fair morning is a reprint, blurred perhaps, of the opening of the First Day; but this splendour was a thing to be put aside from all other days and remembered. The stars had no fire in them and the fish had stopped jumping, when the black water of the lake paled and grew grey. While he watched, it seemed to the Englishman that some voice on the hills were intoning the first verses of Genesis. The grey light moved on the face of the waters till, with no interval, a blood-red glare shot up from the horizon and, inky black against the intense red, a giant crane floated out towards the sun. In the still shadowed city the great Palace drum boomed and throbbed to show that the gates were open, while the dawn swept up the valley and made all things clear. The blind man who said:--“The blast of a trumpet is red” spoke only the truth. The breaking of the red dawn is like the blast of a trumpet. “What,” said the _chowkidar_, picking the ashes of the overnight fire out of his beard, “what, I say, are five eggs or twelve eggs to such a Raj as ours? What also are fowls--what are"--.... “There was no talk of fowls. Where is the fowl-man from whom you got the eggs?” “He is here. No, he is there. I do not know. I am an old man, and I and the Raj supply everything without price. The _murghiwalla_ will be paid by the State--liberally paid. Let the _Sahib_ be happy! _Wah_! _Wah_!”