And, at stated intervals, like wrong notes in a succession of harmonies, there sprang wrought-iron gas-lamps fitted with electric bulbs!

So riding, he came to the heart of the city—­a vast open space, where the shops seemed brighter, the crowds gayer; and, by contrast, the human rag and bone heaps, beggars and cripples, more terrible to behold.

Here the first ray of actual recognition flashed through the haze of familiar sensations.  For here architectural exuberance culminated in the vast bewildering facade of the Hall of the Winds and the Palace flaunting its royal standard—­five colours blazoned on cloth of gold.  But it was not these that held Roy’s gaze.  It was the group of Brahmin temples, elaborately carven, rose-red from plinth to summit, rising through flights of crows and iridescent pigeons; their monolithic forms clean cut against the dusty haze; their shallow steps flanked with marble elephants, splashed with orange-yellow robes of holy men and groups of brightly-veiled women.

At sight of them Roy instinctively drew rein;—­and there, in the midst of the shifting, drifting crowd, he sat motionless, letting the vision sink deep into his mind, while Terry investigated a promising smell, and Bishun Singh, wholly incurious, gossiped with a potter, from whose wheel emerged an endless succession of chiraghs—­primitive clay lamps, with a lip for the cotton wick.  His neighbour, with equal zest, was creating very ill-shapen clay animals, birds and fishes.

“Look, Hazur—­for the Dewali,” Bishun Singh thrust upon Roy’s attention the one matter of real moment, just then, to all right-minded Hindus.  “Only two more weeks.  So they are making lamps, without number, for houses and shops and the palace of the Maharaja.  Very big tamasha, Hazur.”

He enlarged volubly on the coming festival, to this Sahib, who took such unusual interest in the ways of India; while Roy sat silent, watching, remembering....

Nearly nineteen years ago he had seen the Dewali—­Feast of Lights; had been driven, sitting on his mother’s knee, through a fairy city outlined in tremulous points of flame, down to the shore of the Man Sagar Lake, where the lights quavered and ran together and the dead ruins came alive with them.  All night they had seemed to flicker in his fanciful brain; and next morning-unable to think or talk of anything else—­he had been moved to dictate his very first attempt at a poem....

Suddenly, sharply, there rose above the chatter of the crowd and the tireless clamour of crows, a scream of mingled rage and anguish that tore at his nerves and sent a chill down his spine.

Swinging round in the saddle, he saw a spectral figure of a woman—­detached from a group of spectres, huddled ironically against bulging sacks of grain.  One shrivelled arm was lifted in denunciation; the other pressed a shapeless bundle to her empty breasts.  Obviously little more than a girl—­yet with no trace of youth in her ravaged face—­she stood erect, every bone visible, before the stall of a bangle-seller, fat and well liking, exuding rolls of flesh above his dhoti,[8] and enjoying his savoury chupattis hot and hot; entirely impervious to unseemly ravings; entirely occupied in pursuing trickles of ghi[9] with his agile tongue that none might be lost.