To me there was double dulness in the scenery: it seemed to be Sind
over again-the same morning mist and noon-tide glare; the same hot wind
and heat clouds, and fiery sunset, and evening glow; the same pillars
of dust and "devils" of sand sweeping like giants over the plain; the
same turbid waters of a broad, shallow stream studded with sand-banks
and silt-isles, with crashing earth slips and ruins nodding over a kind
of cliff, whose base the stream gnaws with noisy tooth. On the banks,
saline ground sparkled and glittered like hoar-frost in the sun; and
here and there mud villages, solitary huts, pigeon-towers, or watch
turrets, whence litt1e brown boys shouted and slung stones at the
birds, peeped out from among bright green patches of palm-tree,
tamarisk, and mimosa, of maize, tobacco, and sugar-cane. Beyond the
narrow tongue of land on the river banks lay the glaring, yellow
Desert, with its low hills and sand slopes, bounded by innumerable
pyramids of Nature's architecture. The boats, with their sharp bows,
preposterous sterns, and lateen sails, might have belonged to the
Indus. So might the chocolate-skinned, blue-robed peasantry; the women
carrying progeny on their hips, with the eternal waterpot on their
heads; and the men sleeping in the shade or following the plough, to
which probably Osiris first put hand. The lower animals, like the
higher, were the same; gaunt, mange-stained camels, muddy buffaloes,
scurvied donkeys, sneaking jackals, and fox-like dogs. Even the
feathered creatures were perfectly familiar to my eye-
[p.32]paddy birds, pelicans, giant cranes, kites and wild water-fowl.