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Thanakar got stuck in a parade. As he hurried through the city gates, up towards the Temple of Enforcement, the streets had been stiffening with people. Exhausted, he had pushed forward without thinking, struggling through the crowd. People gave way, making the gestures of respect. Now he wished they had stood firm, because behind him they had packed so tightly that there was no way back, and in front the procession stretched for miles along the Street of Seven Sins.

He stood sweating in a crowd of seminarians. They had the places of honor by the roadside, and Thanakar had a good view too, because they were young and small, and he could see above their heads.

There must have been a hundred of them, with red robes and high voices and shaved heads. Thanakar cursed, but in a way it was good just to stand there resting, because he had come such a long way and his leg was tired.

The road was lined with torches and with men who stood with gas lamps balanced on their heads and on their shoulders: small tanks, like bags of roots, and then the candelabra branched from them, like little trees lit with fiery blossoms. In the road, muscular young men tumbled through the air, leaping, and twisting, and slipping in hot rivers of elephant piss. Then came men cracking whips, and firedancers of various kinds. Men danced with torches in their teeth. Others tossed huge wheels of fire above their heads. Others had attached one end of a long rope to their hair, the other to a burning lamp. Wiggling their necks, they swung the lamp around them in wide circles while they clapped their hands and danced.

They got down and rolled along the ground, the lamp skimming in a circle just above the tar.

Then came some elephants, painted in gay colors. In summer, they flourished in the summer jungles near the city, but these had been imported for the festival, brought up from the South in railway cars. The cold had made them sick. Their eyes shone feverishly in the torchlight, and some had a peculiar gummy liquid hanging from their tusks. They bellowed mournfully, but the sound was covered up with drumming.

Drummers marched behind them, bare-chested, with white turbans and white baggy trousers fastened tightly at the ankle. They tied their drums across their waists, and beat on the ends as if to break them. In all processions there were hundreds of them, and in this one there were thousands, jumping, swaying, leaping in unison, their complex rhythms rolling up and down the line.

They leapt and turned in front of him, leapt and turned, back and forth, back and forth, banging on their drums with blistering palms. And as they passed, he could feel the rhythms in his body, as if a drummer had gotten loose in there and was drumming on his heart as if to break it, because he knew what came next. These parades were all the same. Elephants and skeleton dancers, shaking rattles to imitate the chattering of bones. Elephants; and then he could see them too, the flagellants, and hear the singing of their whips, and then his heart was breaking, as it always did, and he could feel tears closing his throat.