For it was close on dawn. The most silent, most restful hour of an Indian night, yet one still holding that vague sense of life and movement inseparable from an environment in which there is no set time for sleeping or waking; in which folk gossip all night, and sleep all day, should the humour so take them.
It had so seized on some one, apparently, this New Year's night, for two voices rose, not in whispers, but monotone, from one of the verandahs in Government House--rose insistently, until, from within the closed doors, came a sharp though drowsy order for silence--
'Chupra'o!'
The voices ceased; such orders, even when drowsy, must be obeyed, since they come from the master: at any rate, till he sleeps again.
So the minutes slipped by. Upon the round rim of the level wheatfields beyond the smoke, the violet sky above the cobwebs faded to grey at the sun's approach. The fog round Nushapore grew whiter, more luminous.
Then the voices began again; monotonous, insistent. Were they, in old-world fashion, beguiling the reality of darkness with legends of some heroic age of light? Were they, more modernly, making that reality darker by taking thought for the morrow, and discussing, say, the depreciation of the rupee? Or were they dreamers still, though wakeful, and were they discoursing of equality and the rights of the individual? Such theories are to be heard nowadays even in this Indian smoke fog.
'Chupra'o, you brutes, or----'
The threatening voice paused as a dull reverberation shivered through the chill air. It was the first gun of the Imperial salute which every New Year's morning proclaims that Victoria, Kaiser-i-hind, reigns over the fog, and the voices in it.
Now, when a hundred and one guns, each with its message of mastery, stand between a man and his sleep, what use is there in commanding silence elsewhere?
So the threat ceased, and between the beats of the guns the voices had their say unchecked.