the opposite side of the road a Marwadi with the features of Mephistopheles dozed over his account book; and a little further away a naked child was dipping her toes in a pool of sullage water that had dripped from the broken pipe athwart the house wall.  Darkness reigned on the upper floors.  At intervals a faint glimmer might be discerned behind the sodden ‘chicks’ which shrouded the windows; and once the stillness was broken by a voice humming a refrain from an Indian drama: 

  “Jahan jahan mukam rahe, amne jhulakiram rahe,
  Safarse ghar ko to phire, Aman-chaman khuda rakhe.”

Which, being interpreted, runs:—­“Wheresoever thou mayst halt, may God protect thee!  When thou hast returned, may God give thee His peace!” The singer was invisible, but around the words of her song one could conjure up pictures of the sturdy serang asleep in the foc’sle of some westward-flying steamer, or haply of the bearded trader afare through the passes of the North-West Frontier, the while his wife in the small upper room waited with prayers for his home-coming, even as the lady of Ithaca waited for the man of many wiles.

At length we reached a small doorway which opened into a cavern black as Erebus.  For a moment we paused undecided; and then out of the darkness crawled an aged Mahomedan bearing a tiny cocoanut-oil lamp.  Lifting it above his head he pointed silently to a rickety staircase in the far corner, up which we groped our way with the help of a rope pendent from an upper beam.  Up and up we mounted, now round a sharp corner, now down a narrow passage:  the stairs swayed and shook; the air was heavy with a mixture of frankincense and sullage; until at last we crawled through a trap-door that opened as by magic, and found ourselves at our journey’s end.

[Illustration:  Fateh Muhammad]

Imagine a small attic, some fifteen feet by ten, under the very eaves of the ‘chal,’ filled with the smoke of frankincense so pungent that the eyes at once commenced to water nor ceased until we were once again in the open air.  In one corner was spread a coarse sheet with a couple of pillows against the wall, upon which the silent Mahomedan bade us by a sign recline; in the opposite corner a ‘panja’, a species of altar smothered in jasmine wreaths and surmounted by a bunch of peacock’s feathers; and immediately in front of this an earthen brazier of live charcoal.  Behind the brazier sat three persons, Fateh Muhammad, a Musalman youth with curiously large and dreamy eyes, and two old Musalman beldames, either of whom might have sat as a model for the witch of Endor.  The three sat unmoved, blinking into the live charcoal, save at rare intervals when the elder of the two women cast a handful of fragrance upon the brazier and wrapped us all in a fresh pall of smoke which billowed round the room and lapped the interstices of the rotten tiles.  Only the peacock’s eyes in the corner never lost their lustre, staring wickedly through the smoke-wreaths like the head of Argus.