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He drove with such reckless speed that camels "rubber-necked" to look at us and whirled me past the fat black gate-keeper into the Ghezireh Palace garden of scarlet paths, moonlike lamps, Khedivial statues, and spreading banyans where each tree continued itself in its own "next number," like an endless serial romance. I nearly asked for Mrs. O'Brien, but turned her into Jones at the danger point.
Our instructed vagrancy, which was hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans, which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi, can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot, where all his memories centred, and where life seemed like a familiar smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease.
It stands alone on the plain near a group of banyans, and its erection no doubt gained many myriads of merits for the conscience-stricken Buddhist who found the money to build it. All goldleaf has been peeled off the pagoda years ago. It was a picturesque party that now enfiladed into the wide stretch of sand which in the rainy season forms the bed of the river.
It floated tranquilly above the chromosphere at an elevation of some 15,000 miles, and was connected with it by three or four upright columns, presenting the not uncommon aspect compared by Lockyer to that of a grove of banyans. Called away for a few minutes at 12.30, on returning at 12.55 the observer found
The shopkeeper provides food for his Abban, and presents him at the close of the season with a Tobe, a pair of sandals, and half-a-dozen dollars. Wealthy Banyans and Mehmans give food and raiment, and before departure from 50 to 200 dollars.
At first he walked in the shade of many-stemmed banyans and feathery-topped palms, while the leaves of tall and graceful ferns brushed his cheeks, and numerous luxuriant flowering plants perfumed the air. Then he came to a clump of bushes, into which darted one of the goats that had by this time become almost wild.
At Zanzibar he was the Consul's right-hand man: he ranked above Bombay in the consular boat's crew, and became a terror even to the Banyans who kept slaves. He seemed, in fact, in his own opinion, to have imbibed all the power of the British Consul who had instructed him. Such a man was an element of discord in our peaceful caravan.
The ordeal of chaffering and -haggling with steel-hearted Banyans, Hindis, Arabs, and half-castes was most trying. For instance, I purchased twenty-two donkeys at Zanzibar. $40 and $50 were asked, which I had to reduce to $15 or $20 by an infinite amount of argument worthy, I think, of a nobler cause.
It gave you an awful sense of the infinity of space and of the endlessness of time. Because he painted the trees I see about me every day, the cocoa-nuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the alligator-pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as though there were in them a spirit and a mystery which I am ever on the point of seizing and which forever escapes me.
On the 1st of June we entered the Soormah, a full and muddy stream flowing west, a quarter of a mile broad, with banks of mud and clay twelve or fifteen feet high, separating it from marshes, and covered with betel-nut and cocoa-nut palms, figs, and banyans.
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