Out of the yellow-brown flood a grave yellow-brown face crowned by a curious brass pot not unlike a tiara, then two yellow-brown arms, reminding me unpleasantly of snakes, curved up in the overhead stroke as the swimmer slipped down to where a rope hung from one of the huge ribs. He swarmed up it like a monkey, to sit still as a carven image on the outermost buttress of the pier, his legs crossed under him, his hands resting on his knees, his eyes fixed on the swirling water below, so that the full eyelids drooping over them gave them an empty, sightless look.
"By George!" said Bannerman carelessly, "he reminds me of the big idol over at the temple. What's its name, Chuckerbutty? You're posted in such things; I'm not."
The assistant-engineer, mindful of the B.A. degree superadded to his ancestral beliefs, became evasive.
"Well, it doesn't matter. I mean the brute like a land crab with a superfluity of arms. The brute we were talking of just now who crowds life and all its joys into one eternal and infernal birth and death--the most uninteresting events of life to my mind."
Bannerman was right. That figure on the buttress could not fail to remind one of Siva, or Mahadeo,--the Creator and the Destroyer,--barring, of course, the arms. And as I looked, the two which the figure possessed rose slowly from its knees and hovered up in the oddest fashion above its head; then sank again as slowly, leaving one with the impression of any number of circumambient members.
"Does it when he dives," said a boy who was watching also; "must have thought he saw something in the stream. He brings up all sorts of things."
The notion was absorbing until Chuckerbutty's idiomatic English, in reply to a query of Bannerman's, roused me.
"Sambo is nickname; but indubitably verbal corruption of the Sanskrit Sambhu, lord or master. Rudra, real name, has equivalent synonymous meaning. The most ancient god mentioned in Rig Veda. Symbolised in eight attributes, sun, moon, water, earth, air, fire, ether, and soul of man. In other words, the visible and invisible universe--as Siva the Creator, the Preserver, the Destroyer."
Chuckerbutty puffed at his cigar in quite a European fashion.
"What rot!" murmured Bannerman under his breath.