Across the great Highway from the temple of Manu, the bungalow of Dickson Sahib sheltered under the mighty sweep of full bearing mango trees. His small son stood between two teachers in the deep verandah and beat his hands together while he saw.
At the top of the hill, the bare bungalow of the old missionary Sahib made protest against the perfume-drunken orient and the colour-mad European world of India with its carbolic-acid whitewash and chaste lines. Down the driveway his children ran away from their teachers and saw.
But in sight of the town—as should be—and beside the courts—as should be—stood the austere home of the Chief Commissioner, most high civil judge of Hurda and all surrounding villages. One of his deputies leaned from an upper balcony and saw.
Back of his park, more than three quarters of a mile away, were the stockades of the Chief Commissioner's elephants. A round parade ground spread its almost level disk straight away front of the stockade buildings. Perfectly rimmed by a variety of low jungle growths, nesting thick at the feet of a circle of tall tamarisk trees, its effect was satisfying to the eye beyond anything seen about the homes of men. Nay, the avenues which led up to the palaces of ancient kings were not so good!
Now all is established concerning the time and the place and those who saw; and it will not be questioned by any save the very ignorant—who are not considered in the telling of tales.
So in the day of Neela Deo, most exalted King of all elephants, came a runner at the end of his last strength. Stripped naked, but for his meagre loincloth, the oils of his body ran thick down all his limbs and his splitting veins shed blood from his nostrils and from his mouth. In the market-place he fell and with his last breaths coughed out a broken message.
Many gathered to discover his meaning. Spread a swift excitement. The shops were emptied, the doorways and alleys opened, and streams of people poured out into a common tide.
Perfume dealers brought copper flasks of priceless oils. Flower merchants gathered up their entire stock of freshly prepared garlands of marigold and tuberose and jasmine and champak blooms—banked masses of garlands were hung on scores of scores of reaching arms, lifted to carry them. Sixty full pieces of white turban-cloth were caught from the shelves of cloth sellers.
Companies and companies of nautch-girls, with their men-servants and instruments to accompany them—even the most costly of these, who were also singing women—poured out of the districts where the towns-women lived and blended in their groups as individual units, in the increasing surge that flowed out along the great Highway, like a river which had broken its dam.
The multitude followed the great highway past the station oval and turned aside into the open jungle—deepening, thickening, swelling, teeming forward. Twenty thousand voices, lifted in all pitches of the human compass, were caught by tom-toms and the impelling cadence of the singing nautch-girls—like drift-wood in a swift current—and driven into rhythmic pulsation.