THROUGH THE HEART OF HINDUSTAN 



441 



before our eyes and 

 with glittering gems 

 blind us to the leprous 

 sores of a famine- 

 stricken land. 



The oily iron steed 

 of the smooth and 

 shining trail makes 

 your stilted stride 

 look rheumatic. Dun 

 as a barren hill and 

 drab as the life of an 

 octogenarian bach- 

 elor, you bathe the 

 lands you traverse in 

 radiant alpenglow, 

 You are blind, a char- 

 latan and an evil-tem- 

 pered eyesore ; but, 

 because you are an 

 optimist and a ma- 

 gician, live on till 

 death confirms your 

 dazzling illusions in 

 fairest fields of Para- 

 dise. 



THE KHYBER PASS ON 

 CONVOY DAY 



In Bombay, motor 

 trucks will batter 

 your ear-drums if not 

 your body. In Cal- 

 cutta a striking taxi 

 driver may smash the 

 windshield of your 

 private car. In Mad- 

 ras the bullocks smell 

 of kerosene and lu- 

 bricating oil. Modern- 

 ity in India will smudge your collar soon 

 enough. So come to the Khyber on con- 

 voy day and dream of the time when fair 

 Circassians passed this way, when jew- 

 eled potentates played pachisi with Geor- 

 gian slave-girls clad in filmy clouds of 

 crepe as "men" and swept the radiant 

 pieces they had won into the soft splendor 

 of their purdahs. 



India is a vast, a prosaic land, whose 

 God of Prosperity is Jupiter Pluvius 

 masquerading under the name of Mon- 

 soon, and whose ideal is Nirvana — some 

 escape from the unending round of mo- 

 notony and suffering to which the hope- 

 less people cling with Sisyphean perti- 

 nacity. 



Photograph by Maynard Owen Williams 



A DISCIPLK OF HIPPARCHUS AND PTOLEMY 



"The stability of the earth and the sun's revolution about it" fully 

 explained for the price of four annas. A geocentric universe is not 

 thought eccentric in Peshawar (see text, page 446). 



Peshawar, like many another city in 

 India, is a combination of native city and 

 cantonment — the former closely packed 

 and interesting, the latter widely sprawled 

 and as deadly dull to the casual visitor 

 as the outside of an exclusive club. 



There is tennis on excellent courts, sen- 

 sational polo by military men mounted 

 on splendid ponies, with white-legginged 

 grooms lined up behind the goals, and 

 the side lines a sandwich of attractive 

 Europeans wedged in between the less 

 attractive and more interesting natives, 

 to whom polo seems aristocratic and ex- 

 otic, although this most ancient of hockey 

 games came overland from Persia 

 through Turkestan hundreds of years 



