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heart speeding to the beat of the drums, caught up in the narcotic effects of the sweet incense
until she is no longer in control of herself, and is driven hysterically up the mountain:
Judith knew the way without any help from him now, she was ahead of him
already, almost running towards the lights off to the right of the roadway
where hundreds of people moved in the dark, and where the music was loud,
and there were shouts and fires burning on the ground, with clouds of incense
billowing up from the flames.
Kanan, who is Judith’s informant and Asian expert as well as her lover, then suffers a
change which reduces in her eyes his strength and influence: Like the Indian who loses his
head in the riots at the novel’s beginning, symbolising the central theme of spiritual
disjunction, Kanan loses an arm. One must embrace a brass pot containing sacrificial milk, but
having only one free arm signifies his limited, mortal attributes, especially in comparison with
the many-armed—an Asian symbolism of strength—gods; C. J. Koch also employs this
metaphor at a critical moment in Highways to a War. Judith is driven away from weakened
Kanan towards another force:
Judith knew something was pushing her, something different from the soft, hot
bodies. It was an urgent noise, musical instruments - cymbals and drums - and
a shout ‘Vel! Vel!’ (TB, 146)
They rush up the stairs on the mountainside, totally carried away by the atmosphere, the
crush of twirling dancers, the thumping of drums and chanting priests, the overwhelming
smoke of fire and incense, and finally reach the cave, where an absurd little plaster figure of
the god draped with garlands of marigolds round his neck receives the offerings of milk in a
cave most notable for its reek of bat dung. The sacrificial rite, the basis of the ancient Vedic
philosophy, is here described with the language of chaos. Kanan has hauled his pot of milk up
the mountain to the god figure, which he readily admits is kitsch by saying it is ‘Just a small
plaster god with garlands of marigolds round his neck’ (TB, 148). D’Alpuget describes the
ceremony as ‘confusion and noise’, with the focus on the ‘chanting and mumbo-jumbo from
priests in white dhotis, things were being flung into open fires, and grey clouds of camphor
incense floated into the air’(TB, 147). Judith sees the festival as malevolent superstition, and
even Kanan views it, at least according to Judith’s interpretation, with contempt (TB, 148).
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