Her voice took a cadence as if accustomed to the words.
'What _is_ she saying?' interrupted George Keene impatiently. He was a middle-sized lad of twenty or thereabouts, powerfully made, with grey eyes and white teeth gleaming in an aquiline, sunburnt face.
'Something ghastly,' replied Dan. 'It always is so, you'll find, my dear boy, when you dip below the indifferent calm of these people. It's like deciphering a tombstone. But come on. We are due already at the World, the Flesh, and the Devil's.' Then he paused, gave a short laugh, and flung out his hands in an impulsive gesture. 'By the Powers!' he went on, his face seeming to kindle with the fuel of his own fancy, 'it's gruesome entirely. This heap of dust they call Hodinuggur, as they call thousands of such human ant-hills all over India; for wherever when you dig, the bricks grow bigger and bigger till, _hocus pocus_! they vanish in the dust from which God made man--_that_ is Hodinuggur; the old city, it means. What city? who knows! Then in the corner of this particular one a survival'--his eager hand pointed to the pile of buildings before them--'not of those old days, for no Moghul in India dates beyond Timoor, and these people are Moghuls; but of that Mohammedan civilisation which overwhelmed the older one, just as we in our turn are overwhelming the Moghul--who in the meantime bullies the people by virtue of an Englishman's signature on a piece of parchment----'
'But I suppose we found the Diwân in possession when we annexed----' began George stolidly.
Dan scorned the interruption and the common-sense. 'Oh, 'tis queer, looked at any way. A mound of sherds and dust higher than the gateway of the palace. I'll go bail that reed hut yonder on the top is higher than old Zubr-ul-Zamân's tower. He lives up there winter and summer, does the old Diwân, looking out over his world and the strength of it--that's what his name means, you know. His son, Khush-hâl Beg, lives in the next storey. A Jack Falstaff of a man--that's why I call him the Flesh. Then Dalel, the Devil, roams about seeking whom he may devour.'
'A charming trio; and what part have I to play in the drama?' asked George with a laugh.
The lad laughed louder. 'So I am in baptism. George for short. Born on the saint's day--father a parson--fire away, old chap--don't let me pull Pegasus.'