Читать книгу Letters of Marque онлайн

18 страница из 25

By this time, for Amber and the Cotton Press had filled the hours, night was falling, and the priests unhooked the swinging jets and began to light up the impassive face of Mahadeo with gas! They used Tændstikker matches.

Full night brought the hotel and its curiously-composed human menagerie.

There is, if a work-a-day world will give credit, a society entirely outside, and unconnected with, that of the Station—a planet within a planet, where nobody knows anything about the Collector’s wife, the Colonel’s dinner-party, or what was really the matter with the Engineer. It is a curious, an insatiably curious, thing, and its literature is Newman’s Bradshaw. Wandering “old arms-sellers” and others live upon it, and so do the garnetmen and the makers of ancient Rajput shields. The world of the innocents abroad is a touching and unsophisticated place, and its very atmosphere urges the Anglo-Indian unconsciously to extravagant mendacity. Can you wonder, then, that a guide of long-standing should in time grow to be an accomplished liar?