Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/106

 The windows flashed with a thousand dazzling reflections. The whole was Calcutta on a perfect day in late summer; a city of brass and copper and gold, hard, shimmering, like the legendary town the Titans once forged out of the molten fragments of a forgotten world.

So the Kashmere steamed up that chained, or rather unchained, monster named the Hoogli, which every once in a while rises kittenishly, gnawing at the water front with sharp teeth, and strewing the surrounding landscape with the torn, battered carcasses of great ships.

Asia! thought Hector. The land which had given him birth! The land which he had forgotten in the soft, yellow Sussex wold! And he seemed to recognize it after the manner of scenes seen in vivid dreams. Like a treasure house it was to him, which he could not enter without the right password, and somehow he knew that he would remember the password—that the ancient blade, which throbbed against his heart, would whisper it to him.

He was curiously excited as he stood there, amidst the chattering, gossiping, laughing crowd of Anglo-Indians, picking out familiar landmarks. Yet his excitement was neither vicious nor violent, but like a delicate network of feelers connecting him with the great, motley Asia which lay there at his feet—“waiting for me, expecting me,” the words came to him unconsciously.

And he stood there and stared and thought, while the Kashmere, obeying the touch of the master pilot, zigzagged her way through the shifting sand banks