compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade
about this place with that which one would see if one were far up
yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains,
where trade has never been and will never be. Have you visited the
Himalaya?"

I shook my head.

"Among those prodigious planes of snow," continued the Hindu, "which
when level nevertheless frighten you as if they were horizontal
precipices, and which when perpendicular nevertheless lull you with a
smooth deadly half-sense of confusion as to whether you should refer
your ideas of space to the slope or the plain, there reigns at this
moment a quietude more profound than the Fort's. But presently, as
the sun beats with more fervor, rivulets begin to trickle from exposed
points; these grow to cataracts and roar down the precipices; masses
of undermined snow plunge into the abysses; the great winds of the
Himalaya rise and howl, and every silence of the morning becomes
a noise at noon. A little longer, and the sun again decreases; the
cataracts draw their heads back into the ice as tortoises into their
shells; the winds creep into their hollows, and the snows rest. So
here. At ten the tumult of trade will begin: at four it will quickly
freeze again into stillness. One might even carry this parallelism
into more fanciful extremes. For, as the vapors which lie on the
Himalaya in the form of snow have in time come from all parts of the
earth, so the tide of men that will presently pour in here is made up
of people from the four quarters of the globe. The Hindu, the African,
the Arabian, the Chinese, the Tartar, the European, the American, the
Parsee, will in a little while be trading or working here."

[Illustration: A DWELLING AT MAZAGON.]

"What a complete _bouleversement_," I said, seating myself on a
bale of cotton and looking toward the fleets of steamers and vessels
collected off the great cotton-presses awaiting their cargoes, "this
particular scene effects in the mind of a traveler just from America!
India has been to me, as the average American, a dream of terraced
ghauts, of banyans and bungalows, of Taj Mahals and tigers, of sacred
rivers and subterranean temples, and--and that sort of thing. I
come here and land in a big cotton-yard. I ask myself, 'Have I left
Jonesville--dear Jonesville!--on the other side of the world, in order
to sit on an antipodal cotton-bale?'"

"There is some more of India," said Bh