Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/81

 itself around the powerful legs of the animal, like morning mists around the stems of lordly forest trees.

But it was the trunk of the state elephant that, before all things else, enchained my glance. Processions I had seen in Ujjeni, and gorgeously decorated elephants' trunks, but never one displaying such taste as this. With us, the trunk was usually divided into fields which formed one exquisite pattern and were completely covered with colour. But here the skin was left free as the ground-tone, and over this branch-like foundation was twined a loose spray of lancet-shaped asoka leaves, from the midst of which yellow, orange, and scarlet flowers shone forth—the whole, in treatment and finish, the perfection of exquisite ornamental stylisation.

While I now, with the eye of a connoisseur, studied this marvellous piece of work, there began to creep over me a home-sick feeling, and I seemed to inhale again all the love-odour of those blissful nights upon the terrace. My heart began to beat violently as I was involuntarily drawn on to think of my own marriage; for what happier adornment, than just this, could be invented for the animal which should one day carry Vasitthi, seeing that the "Terrace of the Sorrowless" was famed throughout Kosambi for its wonderful asoka blossoms?

In this dreamy condition, I heard, near me, one woman say to another: "But the bride—she doesn't look at all happy!"

Hardly conscious of what I did, I glanced upward, and a strangely uneasy feeling stole over me as I caught sight of the figure sitting there under the purple baldachin. Figure, I say—the face I couldn't see, because the head was sunk upon the breast—but even of a figure one saw little, and it seemed as if in that mass of rainbow-coloured