VI
THE KING OF DEATH
It is in the villages, remote from railways that I have found the rarer God-tales, villages got at by long journeys of road and water, past lotus beds, the pink-white blossom growing waist high among leaves large as sun-hats; past groups of mat huts tottering against each other, past palm trees and green swamps of mosquitoes; past stretch of brown earth waiting patiently, face upturned, for the rain that comes not; once, past the quaintest requiem ever written in Nature. … It is a moment worth recall. A slow newly-constructed railway was making its weary way on a hot afternoon in June from mango-grove to river-bank and ferry steamer. It was the usual up-country landscape, one barely looked at it, till, suddenly a change—a great zone of sand, lying in waves, waves patterned like the
