ld.

Would you taste one of the real pleasures of Life? Go through severe
acrobatic exercises in and about a tonga for four hours; then, having
eaten and drank till you can no more, sprawl in the cool of a nullah bed
with your head among the green tobacco, and your mind adrift with the
one little cloud in a royally blue sky. Earth has nothing more to offer
her children than this deep delight of animal well-being. There were
butterflies in the tobacco--six different kinds, and a little rat came
out and drank at the ford. To him succeeded the flight into Egypt. The
white banks of the ford framed the picture perfectly--the Mother in
blue, on a great white donkey, holding the Child in her arms, and Joseph
walking beside, his hand upon the donkey's withers. By all the laws of
the East, Joseph should have been riding and the Mother walking. This
was an exception decreed for the Englishman's special benefit. It was
very warm and very pleasant, and, somehow, the passers by the ford grew
indistinct, and the nullah became a big English garden, with a cuckoo
singing far down in the orchard, among the apple-blossoms. The cuckoo
started the dream. He was the only real thing in it, for on waking the
garden slipped back into the water, but the cuckoo remained and called
and called for all the world as though he had been a veritable English
cuckoo. "Cuckoo--cuckoo--cuck;" then a pause and renewal of the cry from
another quarter of the horizon. After that the ford became distasteful,
so the procession was driven forward and in time plunged into what must
have been a big city once, but the only inhabitants were oil-men. There
were abundance of tombs here, and one carried a life-like carving in
high relief of a man on horseback spearing a foot-soldier. Hard by this
place the road or rut turned by great gardens, very cool and pleasant,
full of tombs and black-faced monkeys who quarrelled among the tombs,
and shut in from the sun by gigantic banians and mango trees. Under the
trees and behind the walls, priests sat singing; and the Englishman
would have inquired into what strange place he had fallen, but the men
did not understand him.

Ganesh is a mean little God of circumscribed powers. He was dreaming,
with a red and flushed face, under a banian tree; and the Englishman
gave him four annas to arrange matters comfortably at Boondi. His priest
took the four annas, but Ganesh did nothing whatever, as shall be shown
later. His only excuse i