My eyes revelled in
vastness, as they swept over the broad flat jungle at the mountain foot,
a desolate sheet of dark gigantic grasses, furrowed with the paths of the
buffalo and rhinoceros, with barren sandy water-courses, desolate pools,
and here and there a single tree, stunted with malaria, shattered by
mountain floods; and far beyond, the vast plains of Hindostan, enlaced with
myriad silver rivers and canals, tanks and rice-fields, cities with their
mosques and minarets, gleaming among the stately palm-groves along the
boundless horizon. Above me was a Hindoo temple, cut out of the yellow
sandstone. I climbed up to the higher tier of pillars among monstrous
shapes of gods and fiends, that mouthed and writhed and mocked at me,
struggling to free themselves from their bed of rock. The bull Nundi rose
and tried to gore me; hundred-handed gods brandished quoits and sabres
round my head; and Kali dropped the skull from her gore-dripping jaws, to
clutch me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing the pillars of the
portico, bent them like reeds: an earthquake shook the hills--great sheets
of woodland slid roaring and crashing into the valleys--a tornado swept
through the temple halls, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm:
a crash--a cloud of yellow dust which filled the air--choked me--blinded
me--buried me--
* * * * *
And Eleanor came by, and took my soul in the palm of her hand, as the
angels did Faust's, and carried it to a cavern by the seaside, and dropped
it in; and I fell and fell for ages.
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