“What then?”
“I’ll tell you after dinner, or rather some one else will. I wonder whether you’ll laugh too—or wince! Trot along and have your talk with Chutter Chand.”
[1] Uniformed doorkeeper.
DECIPHERED FROM A PALM-LEAF MANUSCRIPT
DISCOVERED IN A CAVE IN HINDUSTAN
Those who are acquainted with the day and night knew that the Day of Brahma is a thousand revolutions of the Yugas, and that the Night extendeth for a thousand more. Now the Maha-yuga consisteth of four parts, of which the last, being called the Kali Yuga, is the least, having but four-hundred-and-thirty-two thousand years. The length of a Maha-yuga, is four-million-and-three-hundred-and-twenty thousand years; that is, one thousandth part of a Day of Brahma. And man was in the beginning, although not as he is now, nor as he will be . . . [Here the palm-leaf is broken and illegible] . . . There were races in the world, whose wisemen knew all the seven principles, so that they understood matter in all its forms and were its masters. They were those to whom gold was as nothing, because they could make it, and for whom the elements brought forth. . . . . [Here there is another break] . . . And there were giants on the earth in those days, and there were dwarfs, most evil. There was war, and they destroyed. . . . [Here the leaf is broken off, and all the rest is missing.]
CHAPTER III
“WHAT IS FEAR?”
Chutter Chand’s shop in the Chandni Chowk is a place of chaos and a joy for ever, if you like life musty and assorted. There are diamonds in the window, kodak cameras, theodolites, bric-a-brac, second-hand rifles, scientific magazines, and a living hamadryad cobra in a wire enclosure (into which rats and chickens are introduced at intervals). You enter through a door on either side of which hang curtains that were rather old when Clive was young; and you promptly see your reflection facing you in a mirror that came from Versailles when the French were bribing Indian potentates to keep the English out.