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Moon-bathed, between the carved posts of the palace-gate, two people blocked the way. The music ceased. The sudden silence framed itself against the distant thunder of a hundred drums. The crowd all heads bowed, as decreed drew in its breath and held it. A sea of pugrees moved as brown eyes looked up surreptitiously stared memorized and then looked down again.
It was Shaitan, young Bellairs' Khaubuli charger, with his haunches under him, plunging across the flagstones, through the black-dark archway, out on the plain beyond in answer to the long, sharp-roweled spurs of the Risaldar Mahommed Khan. Dawn broke and the roofs of old Hanadra became resplendent with the varied colors of turbans and pugrees and shawls.
Here and there, silhouetted in the firelight, he could see the pugrees and occasional long poles of men who prodded at the embers. Ululating through the din of tom-toms he could catch the wails of women. He shuddered, prayed a little, and went in. That day even the little bazaar fosterlings, whom he had begged, and coaxed, and taught, had all deserted to be present at the burning of three widows.
The costumes of the different regiments made a break in the drab monotony. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was composed of varied components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom of wearing the shirt-tails outside the trousers.
At last he is free to go ashore in wonderland a medley of Colon and Cristobal, Panama and the Canal Zone of 1907; Spiggoty policemen like monkeys chattering bad Spanish, and big, smiling Canal Zone policemen in khaki, with the air of soldiers; Jamaica negroes with conical heads and brown Barbados negroes with Cockney accents; English engineers in lordly pugrees, and tourists from New England who seem servants of their own tortoise-shell spectacles; comfortable ebon mammies with silver bangles and kerchiefs of stabbing scarlet, dressed in starched pink-and-blue gingham, vending guavas and green Toboga Island pineapples.
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