The ups and downs of life—Stirring adventures—Marching on to glory—Shooting in the tropics—Pepper-pot—With the Rajah Sahib—Goat-sacrifices at breakfast time—Simla to Cashmere—Manners and customs of Thibet—Burmah—No place to get fat in—Insects—Voracity of the natives—Snakes—Sport in the Jungle—Loaded for snipe, sure to meet tiger—With the gippos—No baked hedgehog—Cheap milk.
The intelligent reader may have gathered from some of the foregoing pages that the experiences of the writer have been of a variegated nature. As an habitual follower of the Turf once observed:
“When we’re rich we rides in chaises,
And when we’re broke we walks like ——”
Never mind what. It was an evil man who said it, but he was a philosopher. Dinner in the gilded saloon one day, on the next no dinner at all, and the key of the street. Such is life!
Those experiences do not embrace a mortal combat with a “grizzly” in the Rockies, nor a tramp through a miasma-laden forest in Darkest Africa, with nothing better to eat than poisonous fungi, assorted grasses, red ants, and dwarfs; nor yet a bull fight. But they include roughing it in the bush, on underdone bread and scorched kangaroo, a tramp from Benares to the frontier of British India, another tramp or two some way beyond that frontier, a dreadful journey across the eternal snows of the Himalayas, a day’s shooting in the Khyber Pass, a railway accident in Middlesex, a mad elephant (he had killed seven men, one of them blind) hunt at Thayet Myoo, in British Burmah, a fine snake anecdote or two, a night at Cambridge with an escaped lunatic, a tiger story (of course), and a capture for debt by an officer of the Sheriff of Pegu, with no other clothing on his body than a short jacket of gaily coloured silk, and a loin cloth. My life’s history is never likely to be written—chiefly through sheer laziness on my own part, and the absence of the gambling instinct on that of the average publisher—but like the brown gentleman who smothered his wife, I have “seen things.”
In this chapter no allusion will be made to “up river” delights, the only idea of “camping out” which is properly understood by the majority of “up to date” young men and maidens; for this theme has been already treated, most comically and delightfully, by Mr. Jerome, in the funniest book I ever read. My own camping experiences have been for the most part in foreign lands, though I have seen the sun rise, whilst reclining beneath the Royal trees in St. James’s Park; and as this book is supposed to deal with gastronomy, rather than adventure, a brief sketch of camp life must suffice.
On the march! What a time those who “served the Widdy”—by which disrespectful term, our revered Sovereign was not known in those days—used to have before the continent of India had been intersected by the railroad! The absence of one’s proper quantum of rest, the forced marches over kutcha (imperfectly made) bye-roads, the sudden changes of temperature, raids of the native thief, the troubles with “bobbery” camels, the still more exasperating behaviour of the bail-wallahs (bullock-drivers), the awful responsibilities of the officer-on-baggage-guard, on active duty, often in the saddle for fifteen hours at a stretch, the absolutely necessary cattle-raids, by the roadside—all these things are well known to those who have undergone them, but are far too long “another story” to be related here. As for the food partaken of during a march with the regiment, the bill-of-fare differed but little from that of the cantonments; but the officer who spent a brief holiday in a shooting expedition had to “rough it” in more ways than one.
There was plenty of game all over the continent in my youthful days, and the average shot need not have lacked a dinner, even if he had not brought with him a consignment of “Europe” provisions. English bread was lacking, certainly, and biscuits, native or otherwise—“otherwise” for choice, as the bazaar article tasted principally of pin-cushions and the smoke of dried and lighted cow-dung—or the ordinary chupatti, the flat, unleavened cake, which the poor Indian manufactures for his own consumption. Cold tea is by far the best liquid to carry—or rather to have carried for you—whilst actually shooting; but the weary sportsman will require something more exciting, and more poetical, on his return to camp. As for solid fare it was usually
Pepper-pot
for dinner, day by day. We called it Pepper-pot—that is to say, although it differed somewhat from the West Indian concoction of that name, for which the following is the recipe:—