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He did attend it too, but it left no such memory as another gathering in the same city; a memory which he knows will last after every other picture of the East has faded from his recollection. The party had reached Allahabad at the time of the Khumb Mela, a vast outpouring of massed humanity too great for any but the merest guesses at its numbers.
Do you suppose she's in love with him?" asked Mela, and then she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. "Well, don't eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I'm goun' to git it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she's somebody. Mrs. Mandel can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well or something.
Our conversation soon turned to the Hardwar Mela, which our unexpectedly-recovered friend had left exactly five days ago. All the information we got from Gulab-Lal-Sing was so interesting that I wrote it down at the first opportunity. After a few weeks we visited Hardwar ourselves, and since I saw it, my memory has never grown tired of recalling the charming picture of its lovely situation.
Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they came in.
But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the lost cards.
She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh. "Well, that's just what it does sound like," she explained defiantly to her sister. "I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite.
The people from all parts flock to it for religious, commercial, and social purposes. In the motley crowd may be seen hill-men from all the districts of the Himalaya, natives from the plains, Tibetans from the other side of the snowy range, and Englishmen. This mela is held in a low valley not far from one of the passes into Tibet.
Still there were geographers who leaned to the more ancient idea of a communication between the Indian Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It had its advocates in Spain, and was maintained by Pomponius Mela and by Isidore of Seville.
"I should be curious," he went on with rather forced gaiety, "to meet these spirits and substantiate the facts of Pomponius Mela who knew them and locates them, in fact, in the mountain of the Tuareg. He calls them Egipans, Blemyens, Gamphasantes, Satyrs.... 'The Gamphasantes, he says, 'are naked.
Shortly after rounding Mela Head and shaping our course to the northward, the temperature underwent a marked change, in fact so suddenly were we ushered into a colder zone that everybody is on the search for pocket handkerchiefs, these articles being in very general demand. The eastern coast of Niphon, along which we are now cruising, has several admirable harbours and sheltered anchorages.
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