lean 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.

"That shamele