Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/612



N arriving at Bombay, we housed ourselves at Watson's Esplanade Hotel, a very large building. We went to see the sights of the town, and I was very much interested in all that I saw, though the populace struck me as being stupid and uninteresting, not like the Arabs at all. As I was new to India I was much struck by the cows with humps; by brown men with patches of mud on their foreheads, a stamp showing their Brahmin caste; by children, and big children too, with no garments except a string of silver bells; and by men lying in their palanquins, so like our hospital litters that I said, "Dear me! The small-pox must be very bad, for I see some one being carried to the hospital every minute." The picturesque trees, the coloured temples, and the Parsee palaces, garnished for weddings, also impressed themselves upon my mind.

The next day we made an excursion to see the Caves