Page:ER Scidmore--Winter India.djvu/377

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JEYPORE
355

we enjoyed a picnic tiffin and a view out over the lake and the plain of ruins and tombs. The elephant took us slowly down hill with the greatest possible discomfort, the mahout goading it until drops of blood stood on its neck, and we rejoiced that there was no more elephant-riding in prospect that season.

We were delighted to get back to the fantastic, pink-plaster streets of Jeypore and join in its theatrical pageantry, throw wheat to the pigeons in air, join arrested wedding processions, and watch the sedate old dancers in brogans tramp their slow measures and sing their nasal songs. The street juggler looped the torpid python around his body and held the head before him to be photographed, as if the coiling creature were only a garden-hose with fangs in the nozle. The streets fairly blazed with color in the last red and yellow rays of sunset; brilliant turbans and head-sheets were moving languidly in every direction around the four-corners' fountain; pigeons whirled in clouds and trotted beside us by hundreds; flocks of noisy crows flew to settle for the night in trees just outside the city wall; and when we reluctantly drove away the frost-haze was silvered by moonlight, and Jeypore remains a brilliant picture—too spectacular and color-satisfying to be real, too good to be true, a certain feeling possessing one that the scenery was rolled up that night and the troupe went home or on to the next town. In the cold hotel we slowly congealed, enthusiasm declined, and we joyfully quoted Lord Curzon's opinion: "The rose-red city over which Sir Edwin Arnold has poured the copious cataract of a