* * * * *
The inspector paused, and I seemed to come back to the sliding whir of the trolly wheels. In the distance a semaphore was dropping its red arm and a pointsman, like a speck on the ribbon, was at work shunting us into a siding.
"Well?" I asked.
"There isn't anything more. When a whole train goes over two men who are locked in each other's arms it is hard--hard to tell--well, which is Shivers Martha Davy, and which is Wishnyou Lucksmi. It was right out in the desert in the hot weather, no parsons or people to object; so I buried them there in the permanent way."
"And those are tombstones, I suppose?"
He laughed. "No; altars. The native employés put them up to their saint. The oval black upright stone is Shiva, the Destroyer's lingam; those splashes are blood. The flat one, decorated with flowers, is the salagrama[[15]] sacred to Vishnu the Preserver. You see nobody really knew whether old Meditations was a Saiva or a Vaishnava; so I suggested this arrangement as the men were making a sectarian quarrel out of the question." He paused again and added:
"You see it does for both of them."
The jar of the points prevented me from replying.
[ON THE SECOND STORY]
It was a three-storied house in reality, though time had given it the semblance of a fourth in the mud platform which led up to its only entrance. For the passing feet of generations had worn down the levels of the alley outside, and the toiling hands of generations had added to the level of the rooms within, until those who wished to pass from one to the other had to climb the connecting steps ere they could reach the door.