each side of us rose walls of marble a hundred feet in height, whose
pure white was here and there striped with dark green or black: all
the colors which met the eye--the marmoreal whites, the bluish grays
of the recesses among the ledges, the green and black seams, the
limpid blue of the stream--were grateful, calm-toned, refreshing; we
inhaled the coolness as if it had been a mild aroma out of a distant
flower. This pleasant fragrance, which seemed to come up out of
all things, was presently intensified by a sort of spiritual
counterpart--a gentle breath that blew upon us from the mysterious
regions of death; for on a _ghát_ we saw a small company of Hindus
just launching the body of a pious relative into the waters of
Mother Nerbadá in all that freedom from grief, and even pleasant
contemplation, with which this singular people regard the transition
from present to future existence. These corpses, however, which are
thus committed to the wave, do not always chime so happily in with the
reveries of boating-parties on the Nerbadá. The Marble Rocks are often
resorted to by pic-nic parties in the moonlit evenings; and one can
easily fancy that to have a dusky dead body float against one's boat
and sway slowly round alongside in the midst of a gay jest or of a
light song of serenade, as is said to have happened not unfrequently
here, is not an occurrence likely to heighten the spirits of revelers.
Occasionally, also, the black, ugly double snout of the _magar_ (or
Nerbadá crocodile) may pop up from the surface, which may here serve
as a warning to the young lady who trails her hand in the water--and
I have yet to be in a boating-party where the young lady did not trail
her hand in the water--that on the Nerbadá it is perhaps as well to
resign an absent-minded hand to the young officer who sits by her in
the boat lest Magar should snap it off.

Leaving the Nerbadá we now struck off northward toward the Tonsa,