Читать книгу Life in an Indian Outpost - Gordon Casserly - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The daily routine—Drill in the Indian Army—Hindustani—A lingua franca—The divers tongues of India—The sepoys' lodging—Their ablutions—An Indian's fare—An Indian regiment—Rajput customs—The hospital—The doctor at work—Queer patients—A vicious bear—The Officers' Mess—Plain diet—Water—The simple life—A bachelor's establishment—A faithful Indian—Fighting the trusts—Transport in the hills—My bungalow—Amusements in Buxa—Dull days—Asirgarh—A lonely outpost—Poisoning a General—A storied fortress—Soldier ghosts—A spectral officer—The tragedy of isolation—A daring panther—A day on an elephant—Sport in the jungle—Gooral stalking in the hills—Strange pets—A friendly deer—A terrified visitor—A walking menagerie—Elephants tame and wild—Their training—Their caution—Their rate of speed—Fondness for water—Quickly reconciled to captivity—Snakes—A narrow escape—A king-cobra; the hamadryad—Hindu worship of the cobra—General Sir Hamilton Bower—An adventurous career—E. F. Knight—The General's inspection.

"Why, soldiers, why should we be melancholy, boys,

Whose business 'tis to die?"

With the easy philosophy of the soldier we three officers settled down rapidly in our new surroundings—new at least to my subaltern Creagh and me. Life was a little monotonous; but we did not grumble more than the Briton considers is his right. Our daily existence did not vary much. Before the sun had risen above the Picquet Towers, my white-robed Mohammedan servant woke me to the labours of the day, as the bugles in the fort were sounding the "dress for parade." Moving noiselessly about the room on bare feet he placed on a small table beside my camp bed, the chota hazri or "little breakfast," the light refreshment of tea, toast, and fruit with which the good Anglo-Indian begins the morning. The bad one prefers whisky-and-soda. Then my servitor laid out for me the dull khaki uniform which in India, except on occasions of ceremony, replaces the gayer garb of the soldier in England.

Morning and afternoon we drilled our men, watched them at musketry on the rifle-range, or practised them in mountain warfare up the steep slopes.

We found it difficult to manœuvre off the parade ground, as the hills around were mostly covered with such tangled jungle that one had to hack a passage through it with a kukri or a dah.[1] The drill of the Indian Army is precisely the same as for British troops. The words of command are invariably given in English, while only the explanations of movements are made in the vernacular. Thus in action an officer ignorant of Hindustani could take command of a native regiment in a crisis when all its white officers had been killed. Hindustani is a lingua franca invented in India by the Mohammedan armies of invasion from the north for intercourse with the peoples of the many conquered States. It is really a camp language made up of Sanscrit, Persian, Hindi and many other tongues. Even some military words, such as "cartouche," "tambour," have been borrowed from the French, owing to so many French adventurers having taken service in the armies of native princes in past times. Nowadays the English terms for military things or new inventions are adopted as they stand. Hindustani or Urdu is by no means universally understood in India, though most Mohammedans throughout the Peninsula have some knowledge of it; for nearly every race has its own separate language or dialect and there are probably a hundred and fifty different tongues spoken in our Indian Empire. Urdu, however, is a sine qua non for the British officer of the native army; and he has to pass at least two examinations, the Lower and the Higher Standard, in it. But in addition he must also qualify in the particular language spoken by the majority of men in his regiment. A subaltern in a Gurkha regiment, for instance, must pass in Gurkhali, in a Mahratta regiment in Mahratti; and so on.

After morning parade I held orderly room, disposed of any prisoners—rare things in the Indian Army—and took reports from the native officers commanding the companies. Then I went to my office where, such is the amount of accounts and correspondence in the Service, I found at least two hours' work. Then I visited the hospital and went on to inspect the lines, as the barracks of native troops are called. The Indian sepoy is not luxuriously lodged. The barrack-rooms in Buxa, better and more substantial than in most places, were single-storied stone buildings roughly paved and furnished only with the men's belongings; for Government does not even provide them with beds. So each of my sepoys had fitted himself out with a charpoy or native cot, a four-legged wooden bedstead with a string network bottom which makes a comfortable couch. On this lay his dhurri or carpet, and his blankets. Overhead on a rough shelf stood his canvas kit-bag containing his clothing, while on pegs hung his belt, bayonet, and puggri or turban. Such luxuries as basins and baths are unknown to the sepoy. He strips to his waist-cloth and even in the coldest weather washes himself under a stand-pipe or pours water over his body from his lotah or small brass vessel which he always carries to drink from or use for his ablutions. In personal cleanliness most Indian races are surpassed only by the Japanese; and my men were either Mohammedans or Rajputs whose religions enjoin frequent ablutions.

From the barrack-rooms I passed on to the sepoys' cooking-places. In the Indian Army rations in peace-time are not provided for the men; but, instead, they are given a certain allowance of money above their pay known as "compensation for dearness of provisions." This helps them to purchase their food, which consists in general of chupatties or cakes of flour and water, supplemented by ghee or clarified butter, various grain-stuffs, curry and sometimes a little meat. Many races eat rice instead of flour. Their method of cooking is primitive. A hole scratched in the ground and a couple of stones make the chula or fireplace, in which burn a few bits of wood or a handful of dry twigs. The sepoy mixes his atta, or flour, into a paste with a little water in a large brass dish, rolls it into balls and flattens them out into thin cakes on a convex iron plate over the fire, the result being something like crisp, thick pancakes. Having made a pile of these he grinds between stones various spices, such as turmeric, chillies, onions and poppy seed, moistened with water to make his curry, adds some cooked vegetables or a raw onion, and his simple meal is ready.

Among Hindus, men of different castes cook and eat apart. A Brahmin must have his separate fireplace, prepare his own food and eat alone. Other castes are not so particular and can employ cooks. In an Indian regiment each company or double company is generally composed of men of one race; and Government allows and pays two cooks and a bhisti or water-carrier to each company, these menials, with Hindus, being necessarily of the same caste as the sepoys they serve. Thus in my own battalion we have a double company of Rajputs, one of Gujars, and one of Rawats—all these being Hindus. The fourth is composed of Mohammedans. Each company is officered by men of their own caste, a Subhedar or captain, and a Jemadar or lieutenant; and every two companies are under a double company commander and a double company officer, who are British, and with the commandant, adjutant and quartermaster make up the European officers of the regiment.

My double company in Buxa was composed of Rajputs; but, having had to detach signallers, bandsmen, clerks, and other employed men to go with the headquarters to Dibrugarh, some Mussulmans were temporarily attached to bring it up to its original strength of two hundred men. The Rajputs' method of eating their meals is rather peculiar. Before each they must bathe and put on a clean dhotie, a cotton cloth wrapped round the waist, passing between the legs and falling to the knees. They must eat inside the chauka, a space of ground marked out and swept clean. Food which they wish to carry away and consume outside the chauka, as, for instance, if they are going on a long march, must be prepared in a particular way with water instead of ghee, which is generally used by them in cooking.

In my daily visit to the hospital I would find our medical officer, Smith, hard at work. For, besides the sick of the detachment, he had to tend any natives from outside who chose to seek the white man's medicine. To help him he had a young Indian sub-assistant surgeon, who, despite the scanty medical training he had received, pined to perform major operations. With little knowledge of surgery he wished to resort to the knife on every possible occasion. Once, when left in sole charge of the hospital, he determined to amputate the leg of a Bhuttia suffering from gangrenous sores. The patient, however, was of a different opinion and during the night stole silently from the hospital and fled in terror across the hills to his village. Like most mountaineers the Bhuttias are very subject to goitre. Two out of every three are the proud possessors of these enormous appendages, in some cases nearly as large as the owner's head. They seemed to regard them as ornaments, and absolutely refused to allow our medico to operate on them. One day there was carried to the fort from Chunabatti, the only village for miles round, a Chinaman suffering from beriberi. This man, who knew no word of any language but his own, had made his way on foot from China across Tibet and Bhutan over the Himalayas endeavouring to reach Calcutta in search of work. Stricken down with this fell disease he had lain for months in the village, living on the charity of the Bhuttias, and was brought to our hospital only to die. Another interesting case was a boy about seven years old who was brought in, absolutely scalped by a blow from the paw of a bear which he had disturbed when gathering wood in the forest. From brow to nape of neck his skull had been left bare to the bone, in which were deep indentations from the animal's claws. The shock of the blow would probably have killed a European, but with the marvellous tenacity of life among savage races, the boy soon recovered.

RAJPUT SEPOYS COOKING.

BRITISH AND INDIAN OFFICERS.

Our morning's work finished, we climbed up the hill for breakfast in the Mess. This was a long, single-storied stone building with an iron roof, erected on pillars which raised it six feet from the ground. From the tangled wilderness of the garden, bright with the vivid colours of huge bushes of poinsettia and bougainvillias, a flight of steps led up to the railed veranda which ran along the front of the building, and on to which opened the four rooms—the end ones used as quarters by Creagh and Smith, the centre apartments being the ante-room and dining-room. I wonder what some writers of military fiction, who prate glibly of the luxury in which army officers live, would say to the bare rooms and whitewashed walls of our Mess, furnished only with a few rickety tables and unsteady chairs. Or my subaltern's abode. One room, an iron cot borrowed from the hospital, a kitchen table, one dilapidated chair, a tin bath, and an iron basin on an old packing-case, comprised the sum-total of his possessions. Other furniture we could not get in Buxa; for the nearest shops were three hundred miles away in Calcutta. Of course, crockery, cooking-pots, glassware, linen and cutlery, we had to provide for ourselves. These we had brought with us. Before long, by dint of colour-washing the stone walls, hanging curtains and draperies of native cloth, and decorating the bare walls with the heads of animals we shot, we succeeded in making the Mess quite habitable and cosy.

We were not much better off in the bare necessities of life. Buxa produced little in the way of food. Chickens—more literally, hens of no uncertain antiquity—and eggs of almost equal age were often procurable locally. But no meat. Sometimes a Bhuttia from across the frontier brought a goat for sale; and, although the Asiatic goat is an abomination, yet such an occasion was a red-letter day for us. Bread was sent us by rail from a railway refreshment-room twenty-four hours away, and did not always arrive. Fresh vegetables we never saw until later on we tried our prentice hands at gardening—and a sorry mess we made of it. In the winter we could add to the pot by the help of our rifles and guns; and venison and jungle fowl were a welcome change from the monotony of our menus. But our staple food consisted of tinned provisions—an expensive and wearisome diet. I dare say the British workman would have turned up his nose at our usual fare; and I could not blame him. Even the water supply in Buxa was a difficult question. Our Mess got its water from a spring in the hills hundreds of yards away, led down in bamboos to the kitchen. The fort was supplied from another spring in the base of the hill on which it was built; and all day long the bhistis[2] toiled up and down bringing the water in goatskin bags. But a few months after our arrival the springs nearly gave out; and I was faced with the necessity of abandoning fort and station, and moving the military and civil population to camp on the banks of a river miles away in the forest below, when we were saved by timely rain.

Yet despite the simple life we were leading in Buxa my monthly expenses were more than twenty pounds for the bare necessities of existence. I had to pay rent to Government for my bungalow, and a share of the rent for the Mess, as well as my share of the expenses of mess-servants, lighting, and food. My personal household consisted of my "boy" or body-servant, a dhobi or washerman, a bhisti or water-carrier, a syce or groom, and my sword-orderly, a sepoy of the regiment. This last individual, a Mussulman named Mohammed Draj Khan, had been in my service for many years and, with the fidelity of the Indian, was faithfully attached to me. He went with me to China in 1900 with the Indian Expeditionary Force and returned with me again there five years later. When I was going from Hong Kong on furlough to the United States, Canada and Europe, I arranged for him to be given six months' leave to his home in India. But when he heard of it Draj Khan was exceedingly wroth.

"What? Am I not to accompany my Sahib?" he demanded indignantly.

"No; I cannot take you with me to Europe," I replied. "But I have got you leave to go home to your wife whom you have not seen for four years."

"Oh, my wife does not matter," was the ungallant answer; "she can wait. But my place is with my Sahib wherever he goes."

And he has never forgiven me for not taking him; although he still continues to serve me faithfully.

Our sepoys fared better than their British officers. We found on arrival that the local bunniahs or shop-keepers were in the habit of supplying the men with very inferior and bad flour and other food-stuffs and charging a high price for them, relying on the monopoly they enjoyed. I determined to follow the example of the United States Government and make war on trusts. So I sent my native officers to Cooch Behar and other towns fifty miles away to purchase supplies, and ordered flour in bulk from a mill under English management in Calcutta. I had it sent by rail to Buxa Road Station, and conveyed thence by our elephants and Bhuttia coolies. An elephant can carry a weight of ten or twelve maunds—a maund being equal to eighty pounds. The sturdy Bhuttias, women as well as men, could come up our steep road, each with a load of two maunds on his or her back. Their burdens were fixed in two forked sticks bound to the shoulders in such a way that when the bearers sat down the ends of the sticks rested on the ground and supported the weight. But when heavily laden a coolie cannot then rise to his feet unaided, unless he first lies down, rolls over on his face, then pushes himself on to his knees with his hands and stands up. In Chemulpo and Seoul in Corea I have seen coolies employ a similar method of carrying their loads.

MY DOUBLE COMPANY.

MY BACHELOR ESTABLISHMENT.

After breakfast I returned to my house to pass the hours until the afternoon parade. After the dilapidated bungalows of most stations in India, with their thatched roofs sheltering rats, squirrels and even snakes, and their floors of pounded earth and decayed matting full of fleas, ants and the myriad plagues of insect life of the East, my small house seemed luxurious. It was built strongly of rough stone blocks to withstand the awful mountain storms. The roof was of iron which rang like a drum to the heavy rain and monster hailstones of the Monsoon. It contained four small rooms with ceilings and floors of wood, each with its fireplace. For during the winter we found it cold enough to have fires going day and night, the jungle around furnishing us with an ample supply of fuel. The meagre furniture which I had bought from the major of the Punjabis was soon supplemented with a few more articles sent from Calcutta. The little garden contained mango trees and a tree bearing the huge and evil-smelling jack-fruit, of which natives are very fond, though its sickening odour and oversweet taste repel most Europeans. The hedges around my compound were of wild roses. At one side stood my stable and the stone outhouses in which my servants lived; for in India the domestics are not lodged in the bungalow.

The afternoon was occupied with drills, signalling practice and military lectures to the non-commissioned officers.

Buxa offered scant amusement within its limits to us Britishers. We had hockey-matches with the men two or three times a week. Creagh, being a keen golfer, tried to make miniature links about the fort; but, after losing six balls in his first game in the jungle around, he gave it up. We turned our attention to tennis. A comparatively level space hewed out of the mountain-side was fixed on as a court. Rocks four or five feet high were dug out of it; and the elephants were employed for days in bringing up earth from the plains below to spread on it. But more rocks seemed to grow in it and shove their heads through the thin covering of mould, grass came in thick, wiry patches; and altogether our tennis court could not be pronounced a success.

Evening brought with it the dullest hours of the day. The Calcutta newspaper, which arrived by post every afternoon, was soon read; and the English journals sent to us from regimental headquarters were a month old. None of us were keen card players. Our library was small; and, as light literature, drill books soon cease to charm. Our daily life was too uneventful to afford many subjects of conversation; and as topics the incompetency of Naik Chandu Singh or the slackness on parade of Sepoy Pem Singh were not engrossing. England seemed too far away for the discussion of its politics to interest us. The pitiable limitations of men as talkers was painfully evident. Not being women we had no ever-ready subjects of conversation in dress, babies and servants' misdemeanours; and we could not talk scandal about ourselves. So, after the meagre dinner that our Gurkha cook contrived out of the athletic hen or tinned sausage, we threw ourselves into long chairs around the fire; Creagh betook himself to the study of military books for his forthcoming examination for promotion, and the doctor and I thumbed tattered novels we had read a dozen times.

But Buxa was not the loneliest spot in which I have been quartered. As a subaltern I was stationed alone for many months in Asirgarh in the Central Provinces, an old Indian fortress on a hill lost in the jungle. That was solitude itself. My nearest European neighbour was forty miles away. I saw no white face and spoke no word of English for months at a time. Once a year a General was supposed to pay it the compliment of an official inspection, although the garrison consisted only of a British subaltern and fifty sepoys. But I think that after one occasion when the General and his staff officers nearly died on my hands of ptomaine poisoning—really contracted on their journey thither, but ascribed by the uncharitable among my friends to my base devices and resentment at having my peace disturbed by this officious intrusion—this duty grew out of favour with generals who valued their lives. This detachment has since been abolished.

The fortress was wonderfully interesting, with a history reaching back to the eighth century. It had passed through the hands of the various masters of India in turn, and every stone of its walls had a story to tell. Taken by the British from the Maharajah of Gwalior twice, it remained in our possession from 1818, and was formerly garrisoned by a company of Artillery, a British regiment and a wing of a native battalion. Fallen from its high estate, a subaltern and half a company were considered enough for it in my time. And the subaltern combined in his own person the important offices of Commandant of Asirgarh Fortress, officer commanding the troops, officer in charge of military treasure chest, Cantonment Magistrate third class, and Church Trustee. For inside the fort were a Protestant Church in disused barracks, a ruined Catholic Chapel on the altar of which wild monkeys perched, and two cemeteries full of graves of English dead. The post was a lonely one for a young officer. I lived in the only habitable European building, formerly the general hospital, for which I paid twenty-four pounds a year to Government. The dead house was just outside my bedroom window. The interior of the fort, the fifty-feet-high walls of which were a mile and a half in circumference, was crowded with the ruins of an ancient palace, a large mosque, an old Moghul prison with wonderful underground passages and cells, and—most depressing of all—the gaunt wrecks of English bungalows with bare rafters and tattered ceiling-cloths. A fit habitation for ghosts. And ghosts there were. No native would venture about the fort alone at night. Weird tales had my sepoys to tell of the Shaitans and bhuts, as they termed the spectral beings that wandered within the walls in the dark hours and were seen again and again by my men. They invariably took the form of British soldiers. And actually one night when I was miles away out shooting in the jungle the sentry at the gate turned out the guard to an approaching white officer, whom he took to be me. The whole guard, eleven men in all, swore next day to the ghostly visitant.

Few English folk at home, who fondly picture an officer's life in India as one long round of social gaieties, of polo, sport, races and balls, realise the tragedies of loneliness of many who serve the Empire. Of the dreary solitude of a military police post in the jungles of Burma, of a fort on the Indian frontier, where a young subaltern lives for months, for years, alone. A boy brought up in the comfort of an English home, used to the pleasant fellowship of a regimental mess, is there condemned to isolation from his kind, to food that a pauper would reject, and a lodging a cottager would scorn. Should one of the many diseases of India lay its grisly hand on him he is far from medical aid. He must fight his illness alone, lying unattended in his comfortless quarters. Outside, a pitiless sun in a sky of brass pours down its rays on the glaring, shadowless desert. Inside, the droning whine of the punkah mocks him throughout the weary day, as it scarcely stirs the heated air. Night brings only the more terrible hours of darkness when sleep is banished from the tired eyes and the fever-racked brain knows no relief. Small wonder that too often in his agony he seeks death by his own hand. I have gone through the hell of sickness in a lonely post, when day after day the awful pains of jungle fever tortured me and night brought no relief. I have known what it is to gaze in my delirium at my revolver and think it the kindly friend that alone could end my misery, until a sane moment made me realise that its touch meant death and I had it taken away from me. But I have known, too, many a poor fellow to whom that saving interval of sanity was denied, to whom a bullet through the tortured brain brought oblivion.

In comparison with Asirgarh, Buxa was quite a gay place. I was seldom alone in it, and generally had at least one other white man with me. We were kept in touch with the outside world by a telegraph line, which, however, was constantly being broken by trees blown down by storms or uprooted by elephants. Once a day a sturdy little Bhuttia postman toiled up the hill with our letters. "His Majesty's Mail" carried for his protection a short spear with bells on it to scare wild beasts; but this did not save him from being occasionally stopped by wild elephants and once being treed by a tiger. For sport we had to descend to the forest; though sometimes a barking deer wandered into our gardens from the jungle, and from the Mess veranda we shot a couple on the hill-side across a deep nullah or ravine.

Between my bungalow and the Married Officers' Quarters ran another nullah. Occasionally, when there was no moon, a panther used to wander down it, calling like a cat in the darkness which was too intense to allow me a shot at the animal. When we came to Buxa we had wondered why the windows of our houses were covered with strong wire netting, and were inclined to be sceptical when told that this was to keep predatory beasts out. But the Punjabi subaltern had been awakened one night by the noise of some animal moving about his room in the Mess, he having left his door open. He seized a handful of matches, struck them and saw a panther scared by the sudden blaze dash out through the door. And twice during our sojourn in Buxa did a similar thing happen.

This particular panther, for we assumed that it was always the same animal, haunted the Station and preyed on the dogs in the bazaar. One day on the road just below the fort it met one of my sepoys who promptly climbed the nearest tree and remained in the topmost branches until his shouts brought some other men to the rescue. Once at night I was roused from sleep by wild cries from a Bhuttia's hut on the spur above our Mess and learned on inquiry that the panther had carried off his dog. Another time, in brilliant moonlight, an Indian doctor then in medical charge of the detachment, who lived in the bungalow next to mine, saw the beast sitting in the small garden intently watching the door of an outhouse in which a milch-goat was kept shut up. The doctor ran indoors to fetch his gun and had an unsuccessful shot at it as it jumped the hedge. Needless to say we made many efforts to compass its death. One night it killed a goat tied up as a bait to a tree within fifteen yards of the fort and was wounded by a native officer waiting for it behind the wall. Yet not long afterwards it climbed into the fort at night and carried off a sepoy's dog. Many a time I sat up in a tree over a bleating goat in the moonlight, but always in vain; and I suppose that panther still lives to afford sport to our successors in Buxa.

Life was well worth living on the days when we could descend into the forest for a shoot. At dawn we started down the three miles of steep road to Santrabari where the elephants awaited us. For work in the jungle these animals, instead of the howdahs or cage-like structures with seats which they carry on shoots in fairly open country, have only their pads, thick, straw-stuffed mattresses bound on their backs by stout ropes. For in dense forest howdahs would soon be swept off. When we arrived at the Peelkhana the mahouts made the huge beasts kneel down, or we clambered up, either by hauling oneself up by the tail, aided by one foot on the hind leg held up for the purpose at the driver's command, or by catching hold of the ears from the front and standing on the curled-up trunk which then raised us up on to the elephant's head. One either sat sideways on the pad or astride above the shoulders and behind the mahout who rode on the neck with his bare feet behind the ears. Then our giant steeds lumbered off into the forest with an awkward, disjointed stride which is sorely trying to the novice. And sitting upright with nothing to rest the back against for eight hours or more, shaken violently all the time by the jerky motion, is decidedly tiring. Prepared for beast or bird, each of us carried a rifle and a shot-gun, and, separating from the others, went his own way through the forest. Sometimes a sambhur, the big Indian stag, was the bag; sometimes a wild boar. Perhaps a khakur, the small, alert barking deer, of which the flesh is infinitely more tender than a sambhur's, or a few jungle fowl, rewarded our efforts. We carried with us food and water for the day and did not return until evening. Then, after leaving the elephants at the Peelkhana, came the fifteen-hundred-feet climb up the steep road to Buxa. And in a long chair in the Mess the fatigues of the day were forgotten in the pleasure of recounting every incident of the sport.

Sometimes we went out among the hills around us to stalk gooral, an active little wild goat. Clambering up the almost sheer sides of the mountains or clinging to the faces of rugged precipices while carrying a heavy rifle was a toilsome task; and too often, after a long and perilous climb, did I arrive in sight of the quarry only to see it disappear in bounding flight over the cliffs.

In our excursions into the forest or by purchase from natives we gradually gathered together a varied collection of pets to solace our loneliness. At different times I possessed half a dozen barking deer fawns, one of which became an institution in Buxa. Scorning confinement she insisted on being allowed to wander loose about the Station, and, soon getting to know the sepoys' meal hours, visited the fort regularly. She was punctual in her attendance at tea-time in my bungalow, being exceedingly fond of buttered toast, and always claiming her share of mine. More than once I have only just been in time to save her from the rifle of one of our rare visitors who, seeing her on the hill-side, took her to be wild. A small green parrot which I had similarly objected to being shut up and flew freely about the Station. From wherever it happened to be its quick eye always marked my servant bringing my afternoon meal to the bungalow from the kitchen; and, having a strange liking for hot tea, it used to fly in through the open door of my sitting-room and perch on my head. It was little use my objecting to this familiarity; for, if I attempted to dislodge it, it would stick its claws into my scalp and hold on to my ear by its sharp beak until I let it drink from my cup. Its propensity for swooping down in the open on any white man was sometimes alarming to strangers. Once a certain civil official visitor to Buxa who was jocularly reputed to be overfond of alcohol and never far from the verge of delirium tremens was approaching my bungalow when the parrot swept down on him and tried to alight on his hat. Uncertain as to the reality of the vision circling around his head, our visitor uttered a cry of terror and tried to brush the phantom aside until I laughingly assured him that it was a real bird. He revenged himself afterwards by encouraging the parrot in a depraved taste for whisky.

A KNEELING ELEPHANT.

In my afternoon walks I used to be accompanied by a small menagerie. Two small barking deer stepped daintily behind me, their long ears twitching incessantly. A monkey loped on all fours ahead, now and then stopping to sit down and scratch himself thoughtfully. A bear cub shambled along, playing with my dogs and being occasionally rolled over by a combined rush of riotous puppies. On our return to the bungalow we would be greeted by no less than five cats; while from its perch on the veranda a young hornbill, scarcely feathered and possessing a beak almost as big as its body, would survey us with a cold and glassy stare from its unwinking eyes. Once in a beat in the forest my orderly caught a sambhur fawn which he bore, shrieking piteously, in his arms to me. In a day or two it was perfectly tame, fed from my hand, and insisted on sleeping on my bed. It was killed by a snake shortly afterwards.

I might almost include in our list of pets our three Government elephants, of which we became very fond. They were named Jhansi, Dundora, and Khartoum. I generally used the last in the jungle; though when looking for dangerous game I preferred Dundora. Jhansi was a frivolous and unsteady young lady of forty years of age; and shooting from her back was impossible. I soon learned to drive them, sitting on their necks and guiding them by pressing my feet behind the ears, as the mahouts do. I was sometimes called on to doctor them; and had to perform almost a surgical operation on Jhansi, when wounded by a wild elephant out in the jungle. I had fortunately been taught how to treat their ailments when doing veterinary work in a transport course some years before. Elephants are somewhat delicate animals and liable to a multiplicity of diseases. Accustomed in the wild state to shelter from the noonday heat in thick forests, they suffer greatly if worked in a hot sun and get sore feet if obliged to tramp along hard roads. Domesticated elephants are generally very gentle and docile; though males in a state of musth often become very dangerous. Contrary to the usually received opinion they are not intelligent; but they are very obedient. At the word of command they will kneel, rise, pick up an article from the ground or lift a man on to their necks. When a mahout is gathering fodder for his charge and sees suitable leaves out of reach at the top of a small tree, he orders his elephant to break the tree down. This it does by curling up its trunk and pressing its forehead with all its weight behind it against the stem and thus uprooting it. When crossing a stream they try to sound the depth with their trunks. A bridge they attempt cautiously with one foot, and, if not satisfied with its strength, will resolutely refuse to trust themselves on it. Though good at climbing up steep slopes they are the reverse when descending. On the level they are fast for a short distance only; but they can cover many miles in the day when travelling. They are excellent swimmers and are very fond of water. In the wild state they bathe whenever they can; and tame elephants thoroughly enjoy being taken into the river and lie in the shallows with a look of blissful content while their mahouts wash them and scrub them with bricks. It is extraordinary how quickly they become used to captivity. In a few days they let their keepers feed them, mount them and take them to water. I have seen two, caught only four months before, being driven in a beat for a tiger; and when he was wounded and broke back into thick jungle they followed him unhesitatingly at their mahouts' command.

Like all hill-places Buxa was full of snakes. One night in the hot weather when dining on the veranda, we found a viper climbing up the rough stone wall of the Mess just behind our chairs. We vacated our seats promptly and killed it with long bamboos. Another evening I discovered one on my veranda. Once when camped in the forest with my detachment, the officer who was then with me and I were sitting at a small table having tea when one of the native officers came up. I had a chair brought for him and he sat talking to us until dusk came. My servant placed a lighted lamp on the table. Suddenly the native officer who was sitting a few yards from me said quietly:

"Do not move, Sahib. There is a snake under your chair; and if you try to stand up you may tread on it."

It was difficult to obey him and remain motionless; but, as it was the wisest thing to do, I sat quietly until I saw a small and very poisonous viper emerge between my feet and wriggle off. Then I jumped up, seized the lamp from the table and a cane from my native officer and killed it.

In Buxa one afternoon when I happened to be inspecting the bazaar a native ran up in a state of great excitement to inform me that a "bahut burra samp," a very large snake, was climbing up the precipice on the west side of the hill on which the bazaar stood. I went with him and found two or three Bhuttias looking over the edge at an enormous serpent which was making its way up the steep face, clinging to projecting rocks and bushes. From its size I took it to be a python, which is not poisonous and kills its prey only by compression. We waited until the snake had got its head and a third of its length over the brink and fell upon it with sticks and clubbed it to death. I had it carried to my bungalow where I measured it and found it to be fifteen feet two inches in length. Preparatory to skinning it, I compared it with the coloured plates in a book on Indian reptiles and found to my horror that it was a king-cobra or hamadryad, the most dreaded and dangerous ophidian in Asia. It is very venomous and wantonly attacks human beings; so that it was fortunate for us that we had caught it at a disadvantage. There is a recorded instance of one chasing and overtaking a man on a pony. It is generally to be found only in the forests of Eastern Bengal, Assam, and Burmah.

When one considers the enormous number of snakes in India it is surprising how seldom they are seen. This is due to their rarely venturing out in the daytime. But I have killed one with my sword when returning from a morning parade in Bhuj and another, a black cobra five feet nine inches long, in my bathroom in Asirgarh. Few Europeans ever get over their instinctive horror of these reptiles; but the natives, thousands of whom die every year from snake-bite owing to their going about with bare feet and legs at night, have not the same dread of them. In fact Hindus hold the cobra sacred, and have an annual festival, the Nagpanchmai, in its honour. I have seen in Cutch the Rao (or Rajah) of that State go in solemn procession on that day to worship it in a temple, accompanied by his strangely-uniformed troops, which included soldiers in steel caps and chain mail walking on stilts. They were supposed to be prepared to fight in the salt deserts and sandy wastes which surround Cutch.

Our first visitors from the outside world reached Buxa about a month after our arrival. They were General Bower, commanding the Assam Brigade to which we belonged, and his staff officer, come for the annual inspection of the detachment. Brigadier-General (now Major-General Sir Hamilton) Bower is a man whose paths have lain in strange places and whose career reads like a book of adventures. A keen sportsman and a daring explorer of untrodden ways, he was as a captain ordered by the Government of India to pursue the Mohammedan murderer of an English traveller, Dalgleish, through the savage wilds of Central Asia. For months he chased the assassin through sterile regions where no European had ever before set foot and at last hounded him into the hands of the Russians at Samarcand where he killed himself in jail. His capture was necessary to show the lawless tribesmen of Central Asia that a price must be paid for a white man's blood and that the arm of our Government could reach an Englishman's slayer in any land. Readers of E. F. Knight's fascinating book, "Where Three Empires Meet" will remember the author's meeting with Captain Bower in Kashmir in 1891, after the latter's successful pursuit of this murderer, Dad Mohammed. Bower was then starting on his celebrated journey from India overland to China, which he has described in his work "Across Tibet." And since those days his life has not been tame. Ordered to raise a regiment of Chinamen to garrison Wei-hai-wei, he landed in Shanghai with one follower and soon brought a corps of Northern Chinese into being, which, in two years after its raising, fought splendidly in the bloody struggles around Tientsin in the Boxer War of 1900. He afterwards commanded the British Legation Guard in Pekin and found ample scope for all his tact and good temper in the intercourse with the officers of the Guards of other nationalities in the Chinese capital.

He spent three days with us; and though his inspection was thorough, and entailed fatiguing manœuvres through jungle I had hitherto regarded as impenetrable and up mountains I had considered unscaleable, we were sorry when his visit terminated. As a rule one does not hail a General's inspection as a pleasant function. But General Bower proved the pleasantest and most interesting visitor we ever had. Tired of our own thrice-told tales we revelled in the interesting conversation of a man who had seen and done so much in his adventurous career, who had journeyed along untrodden ways, had fought strange foes and carried his life in his hand in wild lands where no king's writ runs. We talked much of Knight, whom I have the good fortune to know, a man who, like the General, might be the hero of a boy's book of romance. His life had been equally adventurous. He fought for the French in 1870, and against them later in Madagascar. In a small yacht he crossed the Atlantic and visited most countries in South America. In his wanderings beyond the frontier of India he came in for the difficult little Hunza-Nagar campaign and fought in it. Author, traveller, war-correspondent, amateur soldier, he has been everywhere, seen and done everything. And, simple and courageous, he is a type of the adventurers who made England great. Romance is not dead while such men as he and Bower live.

With a General on official inspection one is inclined to speed the parting guest; but as General Bower waved his farewell to us from the back of the elephant which was carrying him downhill we were sorry to part with him, and all three hoped to meet him the following year again in Buxa. But when he came I alone was left. Smith had gone to Calcutta, and Creagh was commanding another detachment of the regiment in the heart of Tibet, even farther from civilisation than Buxa.