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Your foulness and inward evilness were lost in the background behind your picturesque and tumble-down houses as we floated for the last time down Jhelum's olive waters, where the sharp-nosed boats lay moored along the margin or, poled by their sturdy Mangis and guided by the chappars of their wives and daughters, shot athwart the eddying flood, breaking the long reflections of the storeyed banks.
I but tell the peasants when their cattle and their hens are possessed, and at what time of the moon to plant rye, and what days in each month are lucky for wooing of women and selling of bullocks and so forth: above all, it is my art and my trade to detect the black magicians, as I did that whole tribe of them who were burnt at Dol but last year." "Ay, Mangis.
Now 'tis our custom in this land, when we have slain the innocent by hearkening false knaves like thee, not to blame our credulous ears, but the false tongue that gulled them. And the cure pointed at Mangis with his staff. "That is true i'fegs," said the alderman, "for red and black be the foul fiendys colours." By this time the white sorcerer's cheek was as colourless as his dress was fiery.
In the first place, he had appropriated the only two shikaras he could find, and our baggage was already being stowed in them; secondly, he had discovered both Juma and Ismala, our Mangis, who reported the doungas moored below Parana Chaum, about four miles away over the flooded fields. This was good news, and we ate a cheerful lunch under a tree densely populated by jackdaws.
The cook-boat, occupied as usual by a pair of prolific Mangis and their large small family, was saved by the proverbial "acid drop" the children crawling out somehow or anyhow from among the branches of the fallen tree.
The active figures of the propellent Mangis, and the quiet ones of their ladies at the helm, completed a picture to be recalled with a sigh when we are parted by thousands of miles from this entrancing valley. Sopor we had understood to be but an uninteresting place, but we were, perhaps, inclined to regard things Kashmirian through somewhat rosy spectacles. Anyhow, we rather liked Sopor.
After saluting the alderman, the cure turned to this personage and said good-humouredly, "So, Mangis, at thy work again, babbling away honest men's lives! Come, your worship, this is the old tale! two of a trade can ne'er agree.
Here is Mangis, who professes sorcery, and would sell himself to Satan to-night, but that Satan is not so weak as buy what he can have gratis, this Mangis, who would be a sorcerer, but is only a quacksalver, accuses of magic a true lad, who did but use in self-defence a secret of chemistry well-known to me and all churchmen."
"But he is no churchman, to dabble in such mysteries," objected the alderman. "He is more churchman than layman, being convent bred, and in the lesser orders," said the ready cure. "Therefore, sorcerer, withdraw thy plaint without more words!" "That I will not, your reverence," replied Mangis stoutly. "A sorcerer I am, but a white one, not a black one.
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