34 A Sportswoman in India 



all the effect of the rain had passed off. Sleeping 

 men lay by the roadside in the unblinking sunlight, 

 looking like sheeted corpses. Ekka ponies in jingling 

 ekkas passed us, some of them driving "Tommy" 

 back to the cantonments ; they say an ekka is the 

 most wonderfully balanced contrivance in the world, 

 and the lightest vehicle ever made. Trains of grain- 

 carts were pushed and pulled on one side as we drove 

 by ; it is not all in a moment that the ponderous 

 white bullocks can be moved. One of them, par- 

 ticularly stupid and weary-eyed, lay down, and the 

 relentless wheels creaked slowly right over him, but 

 he got up none the worse. Some of them were resting, 

 lying down between the shafts, at the roadside, and 

 waking up at intervals to blow through their broad, 

 wet muzzles like grampuses. 



Arrived at Lahore, not near the European quarters, 

 but at the gate of the old city, the elephants met us, 

 and we proceeded on them very slowly through one of 

 the quaintest places in the world. The little streets 

 were like so many ramifications in a gigantic ant-heap, 

 swarming with life such business, such talking, on 

 either side houses piled one above each other, any way 

 and all ways, their flat roofs and balconies occupied 

 by picturesque natives smoking hookahs. The never- 

 to-be-forgotten smell of an Eastern bazaar and a great 

 Eastern city, the glaring sun, the pure and dazzling 

 colours, the superabundance of humans, form memories 

 which come back again and again. And behind all 

 that the eye sees, the Purdah women, the Eastern ways 



