And for two hours he unfolded to me a sort of panorama of Indian intrigue, including dozens of statements of sheer fact that not one person in a million would believe if set down in cold print.
"So you see," he said at last, "there's something needed in the way of unobtrusive inspection if the rest of the world is to have any kind of breathing spell.

If you've no objection we'll leave Bombay to-night and get to work." * * * * * Athelstan King and I arrived, after certain hot days and choking nights, at a city in the Punjab that has had nine names in the course of history.

It lies by a winding wide river, whose floods have changed the land-marks every year since men took to fighting for the common heritage.
The tremendous wall, along whose base the river sucks and sweeps for more than a third of the city's whole circumference, has to be kept repaired by endless labor, but there are compensations.

The fierce current guards and gives privacy to a score of palaces and temples, as well as a burning ghat.
The city has been very little altered by the vandal hand of progress.
There is a red steel railway bridge, but the same framework carries a bullock-road.
From the bridge's northern end as far as the bazaar the main street goes winding roughly parallel with the waterfront.

Trees arch over it like a cathedral roof, and through the huge branches the sun turns everything beneath to gold, so that even the impious sacred monkeys achieve vicarious beauty, and the scavenger mongrel dogs scratch, sleep, and are miserable in an aureole.
There are modern signs, as for instance, a post office, some telegraph wires on which birds of a thousand colors perch with an air of perpetual surprise, and--tucked away in the city's busiest maze not four hundred yards from the western wall--the office of the Sikh apothecary Mulji Singh.
Mulji Singh takes life seriously, which is a laborious thing to do, and being an apostle of simple sanitation is looked at askance by the populace, but he persists.
King's specialty is making use of unconsidered trifles and misunderstood babus.
* * * * * King was attired as a native, when we sought out Mulji Singh together and found him in a back street with a hundred-yard-long waiting list of low-caste and altogether casteless cripples.
And of course Mulji Singh had all the gossip of the city at his fingers' ends.