His anticipations were not disappointed; positively nothing came of it. All afternoon the Poonah plodded steadily on toward the pall of smoke that hemmed the northern horizon. The reedy river banks narrowed and receded, gorgeous with colour, unvaryingly monotonous, revealing nothing. Behind walls of rank foliage, dense green curtains almost impenetrable even to light, the flat and spongy delta of the Ganges lay decorously screened. If now and again the hangings parted they disclosed nothing more than a brief vista of half-stagnant water or a little clearing, half-overgrown, with the crumbling red brick walls of some roofless and abandoned dwelling.
In the lavender and gold and scarlet of a windless sunset, Calcutta lifted suddenly up before them, a fairy city, mystic and unreal with its spires and domes and minarets a-glare with hot colour behind a hedge of etched black masts and funnels—all dimmed and made indefinite by a heavy dun haze of smoke: lifted up in glory against the evening sky and was blotted out as if by magic by the swooping night; then lived again in a myriad lights pin-pricked upon the dense bluish-blackness.
The Poonah slipped in to her dock under cover of darkness. Amber, disembarking with Doggott, climbed into an open ghari on the landing stage and was driven swiftly to his hotel.
As he alighted and, leaving Doggott to settle with the ghariwallah, crossed the sidewalk to the hotel entrance, a beggar slipped through the throng of wayfarers, whining at his elbow:
"Give, O give, Protector of the Poor!"
Preoccupied, Amber hardly heard, and passed on; but the native stuck leech-like to his side.
"Give, hazoor—and the mercy of God shall be upon the Heaven-born for ten-thousand years!"
Now "Heaven-born" is flattery properly reserved for those who sit in high places. Amber turned and eyed the man curiously, at the same time dropping into the filthy, importunate palm a few annas.
"May the shadow of the Heaven-born be long upon the land, when he shall have passed through the Gateway of Swords!"
And like a flash the man was gone—dodging nimbly round the ghari and across Old Court House Street, losing himself almost instantly in the press of early evening traffic.