the lobster-shaped
Bombay Island is the famous Malabar Hill; the inner claw is the
promontory of Calaba; in the curved space between the two is the body
of shallow water known as the Back Bay, along whose strand so many
strange things are done daily. As one turns into the harbor around
the promontory of Calaba--which is one of the European quarters of the
manifold city of Bombay, and is occupied by magnificent residences
and flower-gardens--one finds just north of it the great docks and
commercial establishments of the Fort; then an enormous esplanade
farther north; across which, a distance of about a mile, going still
northward, is the great Indian city called Black Town, with its motley
peoples and strange bazars; and still farther north is the Portuguese
quarter, known as Mazagon.

As we crossed the great esplanade to the north of the Fort--Bhima
Gandharva and I--and strolled along the noisy streets, I began to
withdraw my complaint. It was not like Jonesville. It was not like any
one place or thing, but like a hundred, and all the hundred _outre_
to the last degree. Hindu beggars, so dirty that they seemed to have
returned to dust before death; three fakirs, armed with round-bladed
daggers with which they were wounding themselves apparently in the
most reckless manner, so as to send streams of blood flowing to the
ground, and redly tattooing the ashes with which their naked bodies
were covered; Parsees with their long noses curving over their
moustaches, clothed in white, sending one's thoughts back to Ormuz,
to Persia, to Zoroaster, to fire-worship and to the strangeness of the
fate which drove them out of Persia more than a thousand years ago,
and which has turned them into the most industrious traders and
most influential citizens of a land in which they are still exiles;
Chinese, Afghans--the Highlanders of the East--Arabs, Africans,
Mahrattas, Malays, Persians, Portuguese half-bloods; men that called
upon Mohammed, men that called upon Confucius, upon Krishna, upon
Christ, upon Gotama the Buddha, upon Rama and Sita, upon Brahma, upon
Zoroaster; strange carriages shaded by red domes that compressed
a whole dream of the East in small, and drawn by humped oxen,
alternating with palanquins, with stylish turnouts of the latest mode,
with cavaliers upon Arabian horses; half-naked workmen, crouched
in uncomfortable workshops and ornamenting sandal-wood boxes; dusky
curb-stone shopkeepers, rushing at me with strenuous