In the Guardianship of God

by Flora Annie Webster Steel

The engine was conscientiously climbing to the level plateau which stretches between Bhopal and Bandakui, when I heard this story.

Ten minutes before, apparently for no other purpose save to supply the first-class passengers with their early cup of tea, the mail train had stopped at a desolate little station which consisted of a concrete-arched, oven-like shed, made still more obtrusively unfitted for the wilderness in which it stood by a dejected bottle-gourd striving to climb up it.

Here a wistful-faced old man in spotless white raiment had appeared in the dawn with a tray of tea and toast. There were four cups of tea and only two passengers; myself and a man who had already been asleep on one side of the carriage when I took possession of the other at Bhopal. So we saw each other for the first time as we sate up in our sleeping suits among our blankets and pillows. As the train moved on, in a series of dislocations which sent half my tea into my saucer, we left the wistful old face looking at the two unsold cups of tea regretfully, and I wished I had bought the lot. It seemed such a pathetic group to leave there in the wilderness, backed by a European oven and a climbing gourd.

And it was a wilderness. Miles and miles of it all the same. Piles of red rocks, blackened on the upper surface, scattered, as if they had been shot from a cart, among dry bents and stunted bushes; curious bushes with a plenitude of twig and a paucity of leaf. Here and there was a still more stunted tree with a paucity of both: a rudimentary tree, splay, gouty, with half-a-dozen or so of kidney-shaped lobes in place of foliage, parched, dusty, unwholesome.

Not a level country, but one dented into causeless dells, raised into irrelevant hillocks; both, however, trending almost imperceptibly upwards, so that the eye, deceived by this, imagined greater things on the horizon.

But there was nothing. Only here and there a bigger patch of charred and blackened bents, telling where a spark from a passing train had found a wider field for fire than usual, unchecked by the piles of red rocks. That, then, was the secret of their blackened surface.

It was too still in that hot windless dawn for flame, but as we sped on, we added to the dull trails of smoke creeping slowly among the stones and bushes, each with a faint touch of fire showing like an eye to the snaky curves behind. A sinister-looking landscape, indeed, to unaccustomed eyes like mine. I sate watching those stealthy, fire-tipped fingers in the grass, till at a curve in the line, due to a steeper rise, I saw something. "What on earth's that?" I cried involuntarily.

"What's what?" returned my unknown companion, in such a curious tone of voice that, involuntarily, I turned to him for a moment.

"That--that tree I suppose it is," I began; "but look for yourself."

I turned back to the sight which had startled me, and gave a low gasp. It was gone. On more level ground we were steaming quickly past a very ordinary dent of a dell, where, as usual, one of these stunted rudimentary trees stood on an open patch of dry bents, seamed and seared by fire trails.