Krishna bustles round packing things—bustles is hardly the word though, for his barefooted, silent effectiveness. And snoring hardly the word for the noise that son of a thief, the watchman, makes outside.
CHAPTER XV
Good-bye to Dharwar, we are on the move again, the comparatively cold-weather tourists take the road south to Bangalore. We jog along at a respectable rate, not too fast and not too slow, say forty-five miles an hour top speed, and twenty-five mean, which allows us to see things to-day and remember what we saw yesterday.
Before leaving, biked down to the Native Town of Dharwar, a place full of interest, picturesque scenes, and somewhat sinister looking people—tried to make a picture of women and men at a well-head, a magnificent subject, but too difficult to do in a few minutes. There were men pulling up kerosene tins over a wheel, hand over hand, from the cool looking depths of the wide red sandstone well and filling goats' skins to sling on cows' backs, and women in sombre reds and blue wrappings, old and young, and rather monkeyish in appearance; still, some were not altogether bad looking. One old woman had almost Savonarola features, and the strip of blue from the sky on her brown back was telling as she and a young woman leant and pulled hand over hand at the rope. The water splashed on to the pavement round the well, reflected the rich colours of cloth and limb and patches of cobalt from the sky. The women seem to consider this is not a bad part of their day's work; to come to the well-head and chat with their neighbours and show off their jewellery, and probably wouldn't thank you for a modern engine to pump up the water in half the time. They are dirty little pigs; can you make out a little beast to the right, comparatively a superior, extra well-dressed beauty, with very polished black hair and a flower in it? No, I am afraid not; the reduction, or reproduction, obscures her charm completely. She looks round about her and rubs a family water pot with a little mud and water off the road, yet by her religion it would be defiled if my shadow fell on it.
I came away almost sick with the feeling of inability to remember all the movements of draperies and colours; this country needs a Philip and a Velasquez in one, to do it justice.
On the way home I pass a tank with two wide nights of steps down to it, banyan trees hang over it, and monkeys gambol on the ground, and about the dusty trunks. Up and down the steps women are passing with stately steps and slow, they loiter at the water's edge and gossip, then fill their dark earthenware bowls, lift them on to their heads with the help of a neighbour, and come slowly up the steps. The little brass bowls they carry on hip or at arm's length glitter with lights that hit the eye like electric sparks. One figure alone would make an artist's study for days. The colour from the red soil reflects under their raised arms and under their cheeks and into the classic folds of their draperies, strong blue, and deep red, in their shadows and throw up rich reflections to the undersides of the wet earthenware bowls; the water laps over their brims, and the sky reflects like sapphire on their upper surfaces.… Who will say, that colour is not the most beautiful thing in the world—the very flower of love and light and fire; the sign of preponderant katabolism or anabolism as the naturalist might possibly put it, to be perfectly explicit!