bamboo
structures that thrust an underlip out into the street, there was Mhowa
liquor, and _julabis_, and _kabobs_ of goat meat. Open spaces held
tiny circuses--abnormal animals and performing goats, and a moon-bear
on a ring and strap.

The street was full of gossiping men and women and children dodging
here and there; it was an outing where the _ryot_ (farmer) had escaped
from his crotched stick of wood that was a plough, and the village
tradesmen had left his shop, and the servant his service, to feel the
joyousness of a holiday. Mendicants were in abundance prowling in
their ugliness like spirits in a nightmare; some naked, absolute,
others with but a loin-cloth, their lean shrivelled bodies smeared with
ashes--sometimes the ashes of the dead--and cow-dung, carrying on their
arms and foreheads the red and white horizontal bars of Shiva--who was
Omkar at Mandhatta. In their hands were either iron-tongs, with loose
clattering ring, or a yak's tail, or the three-ribbed horn of a
black-buck.

Some of the _yogis_, perhaps Goswamies that had come from the country
where Eklinga was the tutelary deity, had their hair braided and woven
around their foreheads, holding in its fold lotus seeds; beneath the
tiara of hair a crescent of white on their foreheads. A flowing yellow
robe half hid their ash-smeared limbs. A tall Sannyasi--the most
ascetic of sects--his lean yellow-robed form supported by a long staff
at the end of which swung a yellow bag, strode solemnly along with eyes
fixed on a book, the Bhagavad Gita, muttering, "Aum, to the light of
earth, the divine light that illumines our souls. Aum!"

To Barlow it was like a grotesque pantomime with no directing head.
Nautch girls tripped along laughing and chatting, bracelets jingling,
and tiny bells at their ankles tinkling musically. It depressed him;
it was such a terrible juxtaposition of frivolity and the gloomed
shadow of idol worship that lay just the bridge's span of the sullen
Narbudda: the gloomy, broken scraps of the long since deserted forts
that cut with jagged lines the moonlit sky; and beyond them again the
many temples with their scowling Brahmin priests, and the shrine
wherein the god of destruction, Omkar, sat athirst for sacrifice. He
shivered as though the white mist that veiled the river crept into his
marrow.

The Gulab seemed at home amongst these gathered ones. Two or three
times she had bade the driver stop his creeping pace, and looki