Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/75

Rh my diamond tiara changed to moonstones. … The great zone was now but a soft white sheen, a City of Light, and the minarets of some place of Saints towered above the battlements. “A very holy man lived there,” they told me later. It is where holy men should live, it seemeth me, on the Sands of Time, their faces to that other fleeting Earth-force the River of Life. …

And it was travelling by ways such as these that finally I found myself in the canvas home of the wilderness, among people who had leisure to conserve the past, to remember. I sat with them, now on some spacious roof-tree, the sky for dome, now in some little box of a room, jealously guarded from light of day, or sight of man, or I went in and out with them to their Garden-houses, to their house of Gods, to the women’s courtyard, which respect for hornets’ lives had rendered dangerous to man! We were sitting in this same courtyard, my eye on the hornets’ nest in the pipal tree, when “the slave of Kali” told me the tale of Shoshti Devi, the protector of women and children.

“It was a house-cat who first had