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can see you are also a romantic type of personality. I can feel it like vibrations.”
    â€œIt’s the music,” Lee said.
    â€œIsn’t it fantastically beautiful?”
    Raymond and Gopi Meet Lee
    Raymond had visited all the famous monuments several times, both by himself and later with Gopi; now there were others that were not listed in the guidebooks but lay, scattered and half forgotten, throughout the surrounding countryside. Gopi didn’t care much for ancient monuments, either historically or architecturally, and he had only the vaguest idea as to what they were; but he knew them well, for he had often come here with friends for picnics and to smoke and look at girls who had also come for picnics. Today he had brought Raymond to a disused mosque standing in a walled compound with some trees, a tomb, and several scattered graves. Raymond had hired a taxi, which they had to leave standing on the road, and then they picked their way through a narrow track and some tangled undergrowth out of which there suddenly grew a potter’s shed with the potter sitting inside it. They also met a very old man walking behind a very old bullock. After that there was no one.
    They climbed up a steep staircase inside the mosque. The steps and the passageways in which they ended were totally dark, slippery with moss, and smelling of bats, but finally led to a terrace: from here there was a wide-open view of sky and landscape. Gopi, tired of climbing, flung himself down on the paved terrace. Sheltering in the shadow cast by the great cracked stone dome above him, he lay with his arms folded behind his head. Raymond leaned over the parapet to peer down at the decorated walls of the mosque. He wondered aboutits date and guessed it to be around the fifteenth century. He leafed through his guidebook, hoping that perhaps he had overlooked an entry; but there was nothing.
    Gopi said, “Why are you looking at that stupid book again?”
    â€œIt is stupid. I don’t know how they came to leave this out. It’s beautiful. Perhaps Lodi, I don’t know—but the same time as those Mehrauli tombs. I think.” He looked at Gopi, who had wearily shut his eyes. Raymond smiled and said, “It’s very old.”
    This was a joke between them. Whenever Raymond speculated about a date, Gopi said, “It’s very old.” When Raymond asked, “Yes, but how very old?” he would say, “One hundred years,” and if Raymond looked skeptical, he would emend it to five hundred years.
    Gopi said in a lazy and tired voice, “If I weren’t so lazy and tired—you know what I would do? I would take that book—and yes! I think I will!”
    Suddenly he jumped up and tried to snatch Raymond’s guidebook out of his hand. They struggled for it, laughing together. But it was too hot to struggle for long. Gopi let go—though before doing so he gave Raymond a push which was hard enough to send him sprawling against the parapet wall. Gopi laughed heartily; physical mishaps to others always amused him. Raymond also laughed, though, as a matter of fact, he had in falling somewhat grazed his arm.
    Raymond continued to look out over the landscape. It had rained recently and there were sudden stretches of brilliant grass where one would have thought no grass had grown in centuries. Trees dripped with green, and hollows filled with rainwater glinted and danced with speckles of sun. Everywhere there were ruins in broken-off shapes—half a tower, a solitary gateway, steps leading to nowhere—and all of them set off against a water-blue sky that had small washed clouds frisking across it. And there was Gopi relaxed against the drum of the dome, grumbling he was hungry, why hadn’t they brought something to eat, what was the use of coming to these placesunless you brought things to eat? He described a picnic he and his friends had had in this same place, and all the food they had