Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/15

 pretenders, and fanatical dervishes had sought the solace of oblivion beneath its placid surface. Faithless wives and dancing girls had been hurled into its depths from a nearby tower that had been erected centuries before and for a reason known to but few had always been called “The Englishman's Boast."

On the river's farther bank stood the mausoleum.

And there they buried the last male member of the Gengizkhani family, while the women wailed and beat their breasts, while the conches brayed and the tomtoms sobbed, while the Princess Aziza Nurmahal cried her heart out, and while, in an opium shop near the bazaar of the mutton butchers on the northern outskirts of the town, the Babu Bansi, a typical Bengali from his round, greasy, chocolate-brown face to his openwork white socks, patent leather pumps, and striped cotton umbrella, bent over the prone form of his countryman, the Babu Chandra.

He made sure that the latter had succumbed completely to the bland, philosophic poppy drug, pressed half a golden toman into the grimy, much beringed fingers of the dancing girl who had filled and refilled the other's opium pipe and, if the truth be told, had made assurance doubly sure by doctoring the sizzling, acrid cubes with asclepias juice and dawamesk-hashish, slipped his hand into the unconscious man's waist shawl, brought out a key, and flitted into the street like an obese and nervous shadow.

As fast as his wobbly calves would let him, he ran to the office of the Anglo-Asian Cable Company of which his countryman was manager, clerk, despatcher, messenger, and factotum in general, opened the door