11
Surat:
Its Fabled Origin.
. . . . "Something ails it now."
We left Bombay for Surat—I and my old servant Rasul—on the 13th of March 1878. Rasul was lent to me by a friend with whom he had spent many years in pleasant travelling. Surat is as good as my "native land," I having lived there from two to fifteen years of age. Its genus loci has been hallowed to me by association. The bones of a hundred ancestors are this day bleaching in the awful chasms of the Towers of Silence. Memory is besieged by the shadows of a thousand incidents when I find myself in the midst of old haunts, where, for an hour or a day's pleasure, I have passed months or years of bitter privations.
