He pictured the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, describing the everlasting snows where you look up and up at the sheer rocks and glaciers; “you feel like a baby tortoise away down there, so small, as like as not you get giddy and drunk-like.”
One night Hawk told me of a Hindu fakir who sat by the roadside performing the mango-trick for one anna. I illustrated it in the sand as he told it.
caption: Dug-out, September 9, 1915.
1. The fakir puts a pinch of dust from the ground in a little pile on a glass plate on a tripod.
2. He covers it up with a handkerchief or a cloth.
3. He plays the bagpipes, or a wooden flute, while you can see the heap of dust under the cloth a-growing and a-growing up and up, bigger and bigger.
4. At last he lifts up the cloth and shows you the green mango-tree growing on the piece of glass.
“He covers it again—plays. Lifts the cloth, shows you the mango tree in leaf. Covers it again—plays again. Takes away the cloth, and shows you the mango-tree in fruit, real fruit; but they never let you have the fruit for love or money. Rather than let any one have it, they pluck it and squash it between their fingers.”