everything; calicoes from Calicut, where these prints first got their
name; hammered Benares ware; gold-threaded cotton puggris from Mewar;
tulwars and khandas from Bhundi. In some of the little shops, bamboo
structures that thrust an underlip out into the street, there was Mhowa
liquor, and _julabis_, and _kabobs_ of goat meat. Open spaces held
tiny circuses--abnormal animals and performing goats, and a moon-bear
on a ring and strap.

The street was full of gossiping men and women and children dodging
here and there; it was an outing where the _ryot_ (farmer) had escaped
from his crotched stick of wood that was a plough, and the village
tradesmen had left his shop, and the servant his service, to feel the
joyousness of a holiday. Mendicants were in abundance prowling in
their ugliness like spirits in a nightmare; some naked, absolute,
others with but a loin-cloth, their lean shrivelled bodies smeared with
ashes--sometimes the ashes of the dead--and cow-dung, carrying on their
arms and foreheads the red and white horizontal bars of Shiva--who was
Omkar at Mandhatta. In their hands were either iron-tongs, with loose
clattering ring, or a yak's tail, or the three-ribbed horn of a
black-buck.

Some of the _yogis_, perhaps Goswamies that had come from the country
where Eklinga was the tutelary deity, had their hair braided and woven
around their foreheads, holding in its fold lotus seeds; beneath the
tiara of hair a crescent of white on their foreheads. A flowing yellow
robe half hid their ash-smeared limbs. A tall Sannyasi--the most
ascetic of sects--his lean yellow-robed form supported by a long staff
at the end of which swung a yellow bag, strode solemnly along with eyes
fixed on a book, the Bhagavad Gita, muttering, "Aum, to the light of
earth, the divine light that illumines our souls. Aum!"