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light nights in Udaipur, also, a young Indian friend and I spent hours Th
riding on bicycles all around the lakes—an exciting as well as an un- the
forgetably lovely trip, for as we pedaled silently along the still, deserted tw
roads, dark except for the moonlight, dozens of wild boars and other the
game, scared from the woods and underbrush, kept charging in panic and
out of the shadows and across our paths. eli
Po
At M t . Abu, where the exquisitely carved marble Jain temples are, |°
I had my final encounter with Indian royalty, spending an entire after- .un
noon there walking over the hills with a prince. We met on one of the ?a
trails, just by chance. His secretary, who accompanied him, told me p
his rank, but I never learned his name, for he asked, unfortunately, to
be allowed to be " M r . Smith"—and since I went directly to the bus and
train for Bombay from our walk, I couldn't make later inquiries. I
wish you could have seen the people bow and salaam, however, wherever
we passed!

After the Native States, where for ten days at one stretch I never even
saw a white person, Bombay seemed very civilized and "citified." As
a place to see, it was very much prettier and more attractive than Cal-
cutta, but like Calcutta, it was very Europeanized, and held little that
was of particular interest from a native standpoint, except the Parsees.
I remember one rather gruesomely interesting afternoon there, how-
ever, when I went to the place where the Parsees expose the bodies of
their dead in large towers, to have the bones picked clean by the vul-
tures which circle over the city, and then crossed from there to watch
the Hindu dead be consumed on the huge wood funeral pyres out of
doors on which they are put to burn until they are reduced to ashesl

Most of my time in Bombay, as I look back on it now, however,
was spent not so much in sightseeing, as in trying to come to a decision
as to which of four directions to set out in from there. Perhaps you
remember my writing about coming back to Delhi from Kashmir last
spring on my way to Ceylon and thence to Japan, and finding myself
suddenly confronted by three other wonderful possibilities which pre-
sented themselves unexpectedly. One, you may recall, was an invitation
to go again into Kashmir; a second, to go into the Himalaya Mountains
on a trek led by a high official in the British Army; a third, to make
a trip into Persia; and the fourth, of course, to continue the present
journey to Colombo and go by boat from there to Japan.

I t certainly was difficult to decide whether to turn north, east, west
or south. The Kashmir invitation involved going back with other friends
for further blissful days on a houseboat in that lovely valley at its love-
liest time of year. The Himalaya trip held thrilling possibilities for
two months of trekking and camping with complete equipment of tents,
ponies, food and everything in stunning and little known country. Japan
would have meant wonderful excursions through the whole of the blossorn
season with friends who knew Japan well. And Persia—as far as *
could find out, Persia offered nothing—unless one were deliberately
looking for a land of desert wastes, brigands, crawling things, untrust-
worthy natives, hardships and high expenses, with dangers and uncer-
tainties of travel which gave little in return that was interesting to see.