So, on its ceaselessness, broke in again that swaying, pulsing roar of many voices.
"Hârî! Hârâ! Life-Death-Creator-Destroyer!"
"Something must have gone wrong with the ball-cock, and as usual, the plumber will be 'in directly from another little job,'" said the man who had just come out from England, reminiscently. He had gone there to settle his wife and bairns in a jerry-built villa near London; so the memory of something beyond the iniquities of the plumber--those Borgias of modern life, dealing death unchecked, undiscovered--made his eyes pass beyond the crowd, pass the spires of the clustered temples, and settle on the still dark, western sky, over whose curved edge lay the goal of his solitary feet, the end of his pilgrimage, the cradle of his divinities.
"Stand back, please! not yet!" came his order again; and once more eagerness died down to obedience. Once more that cry on the Creator, the Destroyer, ended in that insistent, restless beat of the old god-selling Brahmin's drum.
It was a strange scene. Above, was the growing light of day; below, the square stone font of immortality, and between them a clamouring crowd, a careless few.
And between them what?
A light railing of bamboo, the dignity that doth hedge an empire. That was all.
And now, with a sudden access of light, came the quick indrawing breath of thousands to voice a sort of sharp, short sob, followed by an instant's silence.
Then, long, soft, with the hush in it of some huge wave far out at sea which swallows up a lesser one, the out-going breath of those thousands voiced a sigh.
For the pool was still empty, though the dawn had come.