Bhima Gandharva smiled in a large, tranquil way he has, which is like an Indian plain full of ripe corn.  “I find it curious,” he said, “to compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade about this place with that which one would see if one were far up yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains, where trade has never been and will never be.  Have you visited the Himalaya?”

I shook my head.

“Among those prodigious planes of snow,” continued the Hindu, “which when level nevertheless frighten you as if they were horizontal precipices, and which when perpendicular nevertheless lull you with a smooth deadly half-sense of confusion as to whether you should refer your ideas of space to the slope or the plain, there reigns at this moment a quietude more profound than the Fort’s.  But presently, as the sun beats with more fervor, rivulets begin to trickle from exposed points; these grow to cataracts and roar down the precipices; masses of undermined snow plunge into the abysses; the great winds of the Himalaya rise and howl, and every silence of the morning becomes a noise at noon.  A little longer, and the sun again decreases; the cataracts draw their heads back into the ice as tortoises into their shells; the winds creep into their hollows, and the snows rest.  So here.  At ten the tumult of trade will begin:  at four it will quickly freeze again into stillness.  One might even carry this parallelism into more fanciful extremes.  For, as the vapors which lie on the Himalaya in the form of snow have in time come from all parts of the earth, so the tide of men that will presently pour in here is made up of people from the four quarters of the globe.  The Hindu, the African, the Arabian, the Chinese, the Tartar, the European, the American, the Parsee, will in a little while be trading or working here.”

[Illustration:  A DWELLING AT MAZAGON.]

“What a complete bouleversement,” I said, seating myself on a bale of cotton and looking toward the fleets of steamers and vessels collected off the great cotton-presses awaiting their cargoes, “this particular scene effects in the mind of a traveler just from America!  India has been to me, as the average American, a dream of terraced ghauts, of banyans and bungalows, of Taj Mahals and tigers, of sacred rivers and subterranean temples, and—­and that sort of thing.  I come here and land in a big cotton-yard.  I ask myself, ’Have I left Jonesville—­dear Jonesville!—­on the other side of the world, in order to sit on an antipodal cotton-bale?’”

“There is some more of India,” said Bhima Gandharva gently.  “Let us look at it a little.”