The Rains Came [antikvár]

IT was the hour of the day that Ransome loved best and he sat on the verandah now, drinking brandy and watching the golden light flood all the banyan trees and the yellow-grey house and the scarlet creeper for one brilliant moment before the sun, with a sudden plunge, dropped below the horizon and left the whole countryside in darkness. It was a magical business which for his northern blood, accustomed to long still blue twilights of northern England, never lost its strangeness—as if suddenly the whole world stood still for a second and then slipped swiftly into an abyss of darkness. For Ransome there was always a shadow of primitive terror in the Indian sunset. And here in Ranchipur there were other things besides the beauty of the golden light. It was the hour when the air grew still and laden with a heavy scent compounded of the smoke of burning wood and cow-dung and of jasmine and marigold and the yellow dust raised by the cattle being driven home from the burnt pasture of the race-course on the opposite side of the road, the hour, too, when distantly one heard the faint thumping of the drums from the burning ghats down by the river beyond the Maharajah's zoological gardens, when the screaming of the jackals began as they crept to the edge of the jungle waiting for the sudden darkness to bring to their cowardly yellow bodies the courage to start out and seek on the plains what had died during the day. At dawn the greedy vultures would succeed them, coming out of caverns and dung-covered thorn trees, for the beasts which had died during the night. And always at this hour too came the fine thread of sound from John the Baptist's flute, as he squatted at the gate welcoming the cool of the evening. John the Baptist sat there now, under the vast greedy banyan which each year sent down branches that bit into the earth, struck root and claimed another square yard or two of garden. Up north, near Peshawar, there was an enormous banyan tree which covered acres, a whole forest which was at the same time a single living tree. " If the world went on long enough," thought Ransome, " that tree 3