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In 1925, at the age of thirty-one and seven years before publication of Brave New World, English author Aldous Huxley ventured to India on the first leg of a global tour that would take him and his wife to such places as Japan, China, Burma, and America. Their trip would later be documented in his book, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey. He wrote this entry on 24th November of that year—a day on which he had visited the breathtaking Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur.
The Diary Entry
[24th November 1925]
Standing on the ramparts of Jodhpur fort – on a level with the highest wheelings of the vultures, whose nests are on the ledges of the precipices beneath the walls – one looks down on the roofs of the city, hundreds of feet below. And every noise from the streets and houses comes floating up, diminished but incredibly definite and clear, a multitudinous chorus, in which, however, one can distinguish all the separate component sounds – crying and laughter, articulate speech, brayings and bellowings and bleatings, the creak and rumble of wheels, the hoarse hooting of a conch, the pulsing of drums. I have stood on high places above many cities, but never on one from which the separate sounds making up the great counterpoint of a city’s roaring could be so clearly heard, so precisely sifted by the listening ear. From the bastions of Jodhpur fort one hears as the gods must hear from their Olympus – the gods to whom each separate word uttered in the innumerably peopled world below comes up distinct and individual to be recorded in the books of omniscience.
Further Reading
Although somewhat dated in its perspectives, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey is a beautifully written, vivid, and often witty travelogue through the discerning eyes of a writer who was to become one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of his time.
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