The Gentleman In the Parlour Read Online Free PDF Page A

with cautious steps, and I was shaken and jolted as they ploughed their way through the tracks made by the carts that had gone before, and every now and then I was given a terrific jerk as the cart passed over a great stone. When I reached the circuit-house I felt as though I had been beaten and pummelled.
    The circuit-house stood on the river bank, quite close to the water, and all round it were great trees, tamarinds, banyans and wild gooseberries. A flight of wooden steps led to a broad verandah, which served as a living-room, and behind this were a couple of bedrooms, each with a bath-room. I found that one of these was occupied by another traveller, and I had but just examined the accommodation and talked to the Madrassi in charge about meals and taken stock of what pickles and canned goods and liquor he had on the premises when a little man appeared in a mackintosh and a topee dripping with rain. He took off his soaking things and presently we sat down to the meal known in this country as brunch. It appeared that he was a Czecho-Slovak, employed by a firm of exporters in Calcutta, and was spending his holiday seeing the sights of Burmah. He was a short man with wild black hair, a large face, a bold hooked nose and gold-rimmed spectacles. His stingah-shifter fitted tightly over a corpulent figure. He was evidently an active and an energetic sightseer; for the rain had not prevented him from going out in the morning and he told me that he had visited no less than seven pagodas. But the rain stopped while we were eating and soon the sun shone brightly. We had no sooner finished than he set out again. I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan; when you stand on an eminence they surround you as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings, for they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. To-day there is only a straggling village with broad untidy roads lined with great trees, a pleasant enough little place with matting houses, neat and trim, in which live the workers in lacquer; for this is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives.
    But of all these pagodas only one, the Ananda, is still a place of pilgrimage. Here are four huge gilded Buddhas standing against a gilded wall in a lofty gilded chamber. You look at them one by one through a gilded archway. In that glowing dimness they are inscrutable. In front of one a mendicant in his yellow robe chants in a high-pitched voice some litany that you do not understand. But the other pagodas are deserted. Grass grows in the chinks of the pavement and young trees have taken root in the crannies. They are the refuge of birds. Hawks wheel about their summits and little green parrots chatter in the eaves. They are like bizarre and monstrous flowers turned to stone. There is one in which the architect has taken as his model the lotus, as the architect of St John’s, Smith Square, took Queen Anne’s footstool, and it has a baroque extravagance that makes the Jesuit churches in Spain seem severe and classical. It is preposterous, so that it makes you smile to look at it, but its exuberance is captivating. It is quite unreal, shoddy but strange, and you are staggered at the fantasy that could ever have devised it. It looks like the fabric of a single night made by the swarming hands of one of those wayward gods of the Indian mythology. Within the pagodas images of the Buddha sit in meditation. The gold leaf has long since worn away from the colossal figures and the figures are crumbling to dust. The fantastic lions that guard the entrance ways are rotting on their pedestals.
    A strange and melancholy spot. But my curiosity was satisfied with a visit to half-a-dozen of the pagodas, and I would not let