Every house in the town was shuttered, not a soul was to be seen in the baked streets; only here and there in a shady corner a beggar might be seen asleep. A chigram only was slowly moving along at the slow pace of two draught oxen, carrying the women of a zenana, and their constant chatter[Pg 300] within the curtains of the clumsy vehicle sounded formidably loud and discordant in the silence, the death-like exhaustion of noon. A foxy smell came up from everything that the sun was baking, and towards the end of the day it had become intolerable, corpse-like. It died away, however, after sunset.
ONE:Country folks bring in cages of birds full of the poor little fluttering things, which are bought by children and by many men, captive at the end of a long string; pretty black-headed bulbuls, so bold in the land of the Buddhists, and victims here to the Moslems.
ONE:But for once he was mistaken.In the prince's stables were a long row of brood mares and superb stallions; and then a hundred or so of colts were turned out into the yardmischievous, frisking things, romping against each other, suddenly stopping short, and wrapped ere long in white dust, which fell on us, too.
welcome your challenge!!「あなたらしく」活躍できる場所がここにあります。
TWO:In the hotel compoundmore absurd than all the rest, lost in a waste of open land beyond the seething native townthere was a swarm of coolie servants, their wives and their children, who played all day at climbing about the coaches put up under the trees. And, without ceasing, a maddening hubbub of laughter and crying came up from this litter of brats, more weariful than the silence of vacancy all around.
THREE:Then at Peshawur again in the evening, girls, with groups of soldiers in red jackets or Scotch kilts; the common women were horrible, whitened,[Pg 251] with loose shirts and tight-fitting trousers. One alone sat at her window wreathed about with mindi flowers in the crude light of a lamp. The others accosted the passer-by, laughing and shouting in shrill tones.
THREE:Two fakirs, squatting in a corner, gazed at the sacred stone, their bodies rigidly motionless; they did not seem to be of this world, rather to be statues of gods themselves; their eyes alone were aliveburning.
The attendants threw water on the pauper's pyre, and then with their long bamboos pushed the mass of burnt wood and flesh into the Ganges, where it looked like some enormous black frog with a white patch for the head.A humble poet, more venerated than the kings whose superb mausoleums are crumbling to dust in subjugated India, who, though she forgets her past, is still true to her dreams.Men were carrying mud in enormous turtle-shells that they used for baskets.
