ous
dewlaps, great beasts of a fine Homeric dignity and worthy of
Nausicaa's wain. They swung along with a leisurely rolling gait; and if
their silent feet moved too slowly, the sleepy brown-skinned driver,
crouching on the pole between them, would shame them into speed by
scornful words about their ancestry, more prompt than blows in their
effect on beasts of ancient and sacred lineage.

We travelled at night or in the freshness of early morning, regardless
of the hours, unfretted by the tyrannous remembrances of appointed
times. Milestones passed slowly, like things drifting, which ask no
attention, and hardly perceived in the moment of their disappearance,
serve only to enrich and replenish the mind's voluptuous repose. It was
a joy to lie drowsily back upon the straw, awaiting sleep and looking
out upon the stars through the open back of the cart, while the
fire-flies darted across the feathery clusters of bamboo, and the
cradling sound of wheels and footfalls called slumber up out of the
darkness. And it was equal delight to spring from the cart at first
flush of dawn, and see some far blue hill in the east lined like a
cloud with broadening gold, until the resistless sun rose a full orb
above it, flooding the grey plains and making the leaves of the banyans
gleam with the lustre of old bronze. But though the sun was come, we
would often press on for yet three hours, through belts of
squirrel-haunted wood, beside great sheets of water with wild-duck
floating far amidst, and borders starred with yellow nenuphars, across
groves of mango and plantain trees into landscapes of tiny terraced
plots, where the vivid green rice-blades stood thick in the well-soaked
earth, and bowed brown figures diverted to their roots the thread-like
rivulet from the great brown tank above.

Here would be a wayside shrine, a simple stuccoed portico with columns
streaked in red, enclosing the sacred emblems with their offerings of
golden marigold, and bearing upon each corner, carved in dark grey
stone, Siva's recumbent bull. Here millet fields, with hedges of blue
aloe or euphorbias like seven-branched candlesticks, announced a place
of habitation; soon the village itself appeared, a long irregular line
of white-walled houses roofed with thatch or tile, and here and there
greater dwellings with carved balconies and barred verandahs, behind
which impassive white-robed figures sat and seemed to ponder upon life.
On the right, perhaps, woul