'He writes all about our soldiers and the fighting in Tibet,' he said. 'It all goes home to England on the telegraph-wire, and people at home are reading what he says an hour or two after he has given khubber to the office here.'
'Oh yes,' said the Jemadar in Hindustani, 'and if things are well the people in England will be very glad; and if we are ill and die, and there is too much cold, they will be very sorry.'
The Jemadar smiled. He was most sincere and sympathetic. If an Englishman had said the same thing, he would have been thought half-witted, but Orientals have a way of talking platitudes as if they were epigrams.
The Jemadar's speech was so much to the point that it called up a little picture in my mind of the London Underground and a liveried official dealing out Daily Mails to crowds of inquirers anxious for news of Tibet. Only the sun blazed overhead and the stream made music at our feet.
I left the little rest-hut in the morning, resigned to the inevitable jolting, and expecting another promiscuous collection of humanity to do duty as kahars. But, to my great joy, I found twelve Lucknow doolie-wallahs waiting by the veranda, lithe and erect, and part of a drilled corps. Drill discipline is good, but in the art of their trade these men needed no teaching. For centuries their ancestors had carried palanquins in the plains, bearing Rajas and ladies of high estate, perhaps even the Great Mogul himself. The running step to their strange rhythmic chants must be an instinct to them. That morning I knew my troubles were at an end. They started off with steps of velvet, improvising as they went a kind of plaintive song like an intoned litany.
The leading man chanted a dimeter line, generally with an iambus in the first foot; but when the road was difficult or the ascent toilsome, the metre became trochaic, in accordance with the best traditions of classical poetry. The hind-men responded with a sing-song trochaic dimeter which sounded like a long-drawn-out monosyllable. They never initiated anything. It was not custom; it had never been done. The laws of Nature are not so immutable as the ritual of a Hindu guild.
We sped on smoothly for eight miles, and when I asked the kahars if they were tired, they said they would not rest, as relays were waiting on the road. All the way they chanted their hymn of the obvious:—
'Mountains are steep;
Chorus: Yes, they are.
The road is narrow;
Yes, it is.
The sahib is wounded;
That is so.
With many wounds;
They are many.
The road goes down;
Yes, it does.
Now we are hurrying;
Yes, we are.'
Here they ran swiftly till the next rise in the hill.
Waiting in the shade for relays, I heard two Englishmen meet on the road. One had evidently been attached, and was going down to join his regiment; the other was coming up on special service. I caught fragments of our crisp expressive argot.