iled
his senses with a vague yet poignant familiarity: fruit and corn-shops
with their pyramids of yellow and red and ochre, and the fat brown
bunnia in the midst; shops bright with brass-work and Jaipur enamel;
lattice windows, low-browed arches, glimpses into shadowed courts;
flitting figures of veiled women; humbler women, unveiled, winnowing
grain, or crowned with baskets of sacred cow-dung, stepping like
queens....

And the animals----! Extinct, almost, in modern machine-ridden cities,
here they visibly and audibly prevailed. For Asia lives intimately--if
not always mercifully--with her animals; and Roy's catholic affection
embraced them all. Horses first--a long way first. But bullocks had
their charm: the graceful trotting zebus, horns painted red and green.
And the ponderous swaying of elephants--sensitive creatures, nervous of
their own bulk, resplendently caparisoned. And there--a flash of the
jungle, among casual goats, fowls, and pariahs--went the royal cheetahs,
led on slips; walking delicately, between scarlet peons, looking for all
the world like amiable maiden ladies with blue-hooded caps tied under
their chins. In the wake of their magnificence two distended donkeys, on
parodies of legs, staggered under loads more distended still, plump
dhobies perched callously on the cruppers. Above all, Roy's eye
delighted in the jewelled sheen of peacocks, rivalling in sanctity the
real lords of Jaipur--Shiva's sacred bulls. Some milk-white and
onyx-eyed, some black and insolent, they sauntered among the open shop
fronts, levying toll and obstructing traffic--assured, arrogant,
immune....

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
c