We used to sit at the door of my little tent--two Englishmen adrift on a sand sea--and I used to listen while he talked; for the life he had led made him the best of company, and his combined ignorance and knowledge of the East was a perpetual surprise. Some of his stories were grossly, frankly impossible, but this one, despite its strangeness, I believed unhesitatingly; as any one would have done who had seen, as I saw, the indescribable world-tarnish which long years of loose living brings to the kindliest face, leave it clear, bright, and eager to a rejuvenescence of love, and pity, and pain.
The sun had dipped below the rising rim of the great sand-circle whose centre we were, but the sky was still a cloudless expanse of yellow radiance dazzling to the eyes from sheer excess of light. There was nothing far or near to differentiate one part of earth or heaven from another save the thin red line of ridiculous little flags we had been planting out during the day; and I remember thinking that I could not for the life of me tell the exact spot where, five minutes before, I had seen the last curved glint of the sun disappear--for one bit of horizon seemed to the full as bright as another.
"Looks like the yaller bottle in the chemist's shop; don't it, sir?" remarked Craddock cheerfully--"leastways, as I used to think when I was a boy. Lordy! Lordy! boys is--is boys, I do assure you. Old Pargiter's shop to our village was over against the public, sir, next the church, an' comin' 'ome o' evenin's from the catechism, sir, it seemed Je-rewsalem the Golden. Expect it was the anathysts, an' sapphiras, an' rubies, an' them sort o' stones did it, for boys--is boys, you see, sir." He gave an apologetic smear to his corn-coloured moustache as if to wipe away the flavour of his own sentiment--the wrist-smear of those whose hands are habitually soiled.
"It is like a topaz seen against the light," I replied, accepting both confidence and excuse with the calm indifference which always encouraged Craddock to further indulgence. "I don't think I ever saw it quite so dazzlingly clear, did you?"
He paused awhile, and the blue eyes, bloodshot by exposure to unspeakable lights and unspeakable darknesses of all sorts and kinds, grew a trifle absent.
"I dunno but what I 'ave, sir; leastways it looks more light-like from the bottom o' a well. As, savin' your presence, sir, is only nat'ral."
"From the bottom of a well?" I echoed. "When was that, Craddock? you never told me that yarn."
He paused again. "No, sir. It ain't a pleasing interlood, for 'twas in the Mutiny time, sir, w'en we was all mad devils, black an' white--white an' black----," and then suddenly, as I have said, some past pity and passion and pain seemed to come back upon him with a rush, so that he sat staring into that cloudless sky as if he saw a vision, and his voice came at last half to himself, "By the Lord as made me I dunno which was worse, black nor white, white nor black; yet it was white as did for me, Nathaniel James Craddock, at the bottom o' the King's Well." Then he was silent again, and I sat silent too, for there never was any use in pumping Craddock. His fund of experiences was too vast for you to be sure of bringing what you wanted to the surface. So, after a time, he began again deviously:
"Not as wot it was, so to speak, a well at all, but what they calls, in the lingo, a bawly--a thing, you know, sir, with flights o' steps a-leadin' down to the bowels of the yerth--right down to the water as maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet below the surface, as the sayin' is, sir. It was just a large, round, black spot o' ink, that was wot the water was, an' standin' on the stone edge you could see right up the stairs to a round yaller spot of Je-rewsalem the Golden. Two spots there were, sir, owin' to there being two flights o' steps, an' many a time as I lay like a rabbit in 'is burrow down by the water I'd tell myself luck was in there bein' two--two whites to one black, yet after all it was white as did the business for me, sir, at the bottom o' the King's bawly."
"You must have been very young in Mutiny time?" I remarked in casual aid to his lagging confidence.