IN WHICH THE DESTINY THAT PLAYS WITH MEN MOVES THE PIECES ON THE
BOARD

Dust lay thick along the road that led through the very heart of the
native quarter of Mangadone; dust raised into a misty haze which hung in
the air and actually introduced a light undernote of red into the
effect. Dust, which covered the bare feet of the coolies, the velvet
slippers of the Burmese, which encroached everywhere and no one
regarded, for presently, just at sundown, shouting watermen, carrying
large bamboo vessels with great spouts, would come running along the
road, casting the splashing water on all sides, and reduce the dry
powder to temporary mud.

The main street of the huge bazaar in Mangadone was as busy a
thoroughfare as any crowded lane of the city of London, and it blazed
with colour and life as the evening air grew cool. There were shops
where baskets were sold, shops apparently devoted only to the sale of
mirrors, shops where tailors sat on the ground and worked at sewing
machines; sweet stalls, food stalls, cafés, flanked by dusty tubs of
plants and crowded with customers, who reclined on sofas and chairs set
right into the street itself. Nearer the river end of the street, the
shops were more important, and business offices announced themselves on
large placards inscribed in English, and in curling Burmese characters
like small worms hooping and arching themselves, and again in thick
black letters which resembled tea leaves formed into the picturesque
design of Chinese writing, for Mangadone was one of the most
cosmopolitan ports of the East, and stood high in the commercial world
as a place for trade.

Along the street a motley of colour took itself like a sea of shades and
tints. Green, crimson, lemon yellow, lapis-lazuli, royal purple,
intermingled with the naked brown bodies of coolies clad only in
loin-cloths, for every race and class emerged just before sunset. Rich
Burmen clad in yards of stiff, rustling silk jostled the lean, spare
Chinamen and the Madrassis who came to Mangadone to make money out of
the indolence of the natives of a place who cared to do little but smoke
and laugh. Poor Burmen in red and yellow cottons, as content with life
as their wealthy brethren, loitered and smoked with the little
white-coated women with flower-decked heads, and they all flowed on with
the tide and filled the air with a perpetual babel of sound.

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