"Forster...perceived, and, as far as it can be done at all, described, that sense of hallucination which pervades India. "Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else." As I once heard it remarked of the rope-trick, "it is essentially Indian, because no such trick ever existed". The English in India, for all their doing and striving, became part of that hallucination. The Raj itself (without intending the pun) was a mirage; a dream which British and Indians dreamed together and which individuals will still dream again when they meet, long, long after other dreams and other hallucinations have succeeded. Leave out Forster's pasteboard figures of fun, and his physical descriptions of scenes and cities evoke the dream as they only could if someone who also felt it had written them."