with a simple repast consisting of a glass of milk and a fat, black cigar, and sat down on the open veranda, watching the scene outside on the market place: the low line of shops overflowing with vegetables, grains, cloths, slippers, ropes, household utensils, brasses, and whatever else measured the scale of the natives modest wants; a dozen or so desert men squatting around little fagots of brush wood spread on the ground, and beyond them the gaunt, sneering, huddled shapes of their dromedaries; a butcher's shop, his fly-blown stock-in-trade of beef and mutton quarters hanging from the limbs of a dead tree; turbaned and fur-capped people of every tint and costume, picturesque and swaggering alike in their bright silks and their worn, tattered rags, all haggling, laughing, babbling, shouting, all typical of Asia, that most disconcerting continent—disconcerting, that is, to professional Occidental psychologists—which, somehow, blends an ancient wisdom with an eternal, perversely childlike simplicity of soul.
There he sat and watched, slightly homesick, slightly discouraged, not with the eventual success of his enterprise, but with the brooding thought that success in Asia meant nothing after all; for, even suppose he was granted his “concession,” developed the western province, reaped a benefit for himself and his backers, and increased the standard of living of the natives … what then? Asia was too big, too big to grasp even mentally, and a local success … why, it was like shooting at an elephant with a pea-shooter!
And so he thought, while he waited for the return of the messenger whom he had sent to the Babu
