Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/29

Rh streets, and the paling turquoise sky were background only for the stage processions and groups of the blackest people on earth. Heavens! how black they were! How very black! When Marco Polo came to the Malabar coast, he said: "The children that are born here are black enough, but the blacker they are, the more they are thought of, so that they become as black as devils."

The Tamil people, ebony black, inky black, sooty black, tall and spare to emaciation, lilted past us on the thin, spindle legs of storks. A mountain of red peppers was heaped in one white square, and scores of the blackest Tamil women, in pepper-red draperies and much silver jewelry, slowly walked and worked around its edges. It was too theatrical, too barefacedly a color tableau set to catch the tourist eye, and I was convinced that it lasted only for that half-hour. The primitive hotel facing the railway station was but a loge looking upon the white roadway of a stage, where a specially engaged troupe of tall Tamils and noble white sacred bullocks paraded for our delight. When the train came in there was bedlam drama at the station's street door; then all the black troupe made exit and melted away to distance and shade; there was an interval, an entr'acte, and we went over and behind the scenes for a while.

The station-master was black, the telegraph operator was shades blacker, and an uncut emerald, swinging from the upper rim of one ear, held me with a great fascination while he skimmed the handful of despatches. First and last, and all of the time, in Indian travel, one telegraphs, and then sends more