The two at the sheep-pens were talking and laughing to each other as Englishmen will before business begins; talking and laughing London talk, for one of them was fresh from home furlough, and had only been detailed for this special duty, on his way up country.
"Yes! I had a jolly day," he was saying. "The dear old Heath was looking just as it always did. It was like being born again to come back to the whole caboodle--Aunt Sallies, Tommy Dods, Welshers, and the lot--and then the enclosure--" A sudden sway in the crowd made him look round hastily at his own. It was all correct; so many yards this way, so many that, with yellow legs marking the yards, and those three white helmets marking the limits within which regeneration was legal.
The sway ceased. The moment had not yet come, though slowly, surely, the light grew, to give the great mass of bronze faces a greyish, corpse-like tint, while, half way up the sky behind them, the serrated edge of the sacred snows grew pale, and cold, and stern, like the very face of Death itself.
"Hârî! Hârâ! Hârâ! Hârî!"
There was a note of anxiety in the cry now; for the shadow thrown by the tall houses which hemmed in the wide courtyard was growing paler, and in another minute, at most, the twelve-foot square of cleansing water, which was all the Gods vouchsafed, must surely begin to rise and show at the bottom of those worn stone steps--worn by generations on generations of golden-shod feet seeking immortality.
"Stand back, please! Not yet!" came an English voice, inaudible for the rhythmic roar of the multitude; but the raised riding whip was sufficient. The eagerness died out for a moment from those nearest faces, lost in a cheerful obedience, a respectful salaam or two, a general acquiescence.
"I wish those devils of priests would turn on the tap," remarked the other Englishman with a yawn.
"Yes!" answered the first speaker; "if you are on duty, next year, I'd insist on the curtain being rung up at the bill time. It is rough on the audience; especially when they don't cat-call!"
He gave an imitation of a London gallery's sign of impatience, which made some of the golden-shod ones stare; for the rhythmic roar had died down in one of those sudden silences which seize upon humanity even when in masses. So that a faint "rumpa-tum-tum-rumpa-tum-tum" was distinctly audible from far. It was the tom-tom of the old Brahmin, whom Lance Carlyon had seen selling the endless circles of cut papers as a whole pantheon of Gods.
It is an eminently disturbing sound, that ceaseless, insistent throb of a tom-tom, which has no end, no beginning; which holds ever in its beat the necessity for something more; for another repetition, and yet another.