stood two white-clad Sikhs, very, very still and
attentive, watching the performance, and beyond them was a great space
of sky over a dim profile of trees and roofs and a minaret, a sky
darkling down to the flushed red memory--such a short memory it is in
India--of a day that had gone for ever.

I remained staring at that for some time.

"Isn't old Eccles _good_?" whispered the colonel's wife beside me, and
recalled me to the play....

Somehow that picture of a narrow canvas tent in the midst of immensities
has become my symbol for the whole life of the governing English, the
English of India and Switzerland and the Riviera and the West End and
the public services....

But they are not England, they are not the English reality, which is a
thing at once bright and illuminating and fitful, a thing humorous and
wise and adventurous--Shakespeare, Dickens, Newton, Darwin, Nelson,
Bacon, Shelley--English names every one--like the piercing light of
lanterns swinging and swaying among the branches of dark trees at night.

Sec. 5

I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie
importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in
the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had
my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I
was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I
got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly
torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound. I had an evil
uncomfortable time. My injury hampered me greatly, and for a while it
seemed likely I should be permanently lamed. I had to keep to vehicles
and reasonably good roads. I wound up my convalescence with a voyage to
Singapore, and from thence I went on rather disconnectedly to a number
of exploratory journeys--excursions rather than journeys--into China. I
got to Pekin and then suddenly faced back to Europe, returning overland
through Russia.

I wanted now to study the conditions of modern industrialism at its
sources, and my disablement did but a little accelerate a return already
decided upon. I had got my conception of the East as a whole and of the
shape of the historical process. I no longer felt adrift in a formless
chaos of forces. I perceived now very clearly that human life is
essentially a creative struggle out of the usage of immemorial years,
that the synthesis of our contemporary civilization is this creative
impu