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As I came through the Desert thus it was--
As I came through the Desert.
--The City of Dreadful Night.
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and
pictures and plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of
men who spend their lives in building up all four, lives a
gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides of people;
and his name is Mr. Walter Besant. But he will insist upon
treating his ghosts--he has published half a workshopful of them--with
levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk familiarly, and, in some
cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms. You may treat
anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with levity; but
you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an
Indian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold,
pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler
passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also
terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These
wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a
village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in
this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all
sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children
who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the
fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the
wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse
ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack
Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to
have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have
scared the life out of both white and black.
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