The storm raged all night; and when I rose for parade I looked out on a changed world. The rain still descended in sheets. The parade ground was a swamp. Down the nullah beside my garden raced a tumbling torrent of brown water flecked with white foam. Our rainy season had set in nearly three months earlier than throughout the greater part of the Peninsula of India. And now began the dullest time of our life in the outpost. In the five months that followed nearly three hundred inches of rain fell in Buxa. Work was at a standstill, save for physical drill in the men's barrack-rooms and lectures to the non-commissioned officers. To walk from my bungalow to the office in the fort every day was almost an adventure. Wearing long rubber boots to the knee and wrapped in a mackintosh I paddled across the swampy parade ground in drenching rain, and even in the short distance was wet through. And at night I struggled up the hill to dinner in the Mess along the steep road which was converted into a mountain torrent a foot deep, fearing at every step to find some snake, washed out of its hole in the ground, clinging affectionately round my legs to stop its downward career. All night long and most of the day storms swept down on us; and thunder growled and grumbled among the hills. Dwellers in temperate lands can form no conception of the awful grandeur of a tropical tempest, the fury of the wind, the vivid lightning that spatters the sky and runs in chains and linked patterns across its darkness, the awful sound of the crashing thunder that seems to shake the world. But, terrifying at first, they became actually wearisome from their frequency. When a thunderstorm has raged about one's house for eighteen hours, circling round the hills and returning again and again, one gets simply bored with it—there is no other expression to describe the feeling.
It was wonderful to see the revivifying effect of the rain on the parched ground. One could almost watch the grass grow. Where a few days before was only bare earth, now the herbage stood feet high. All traces of the devastating fires were washed away. On the hill-sides, fertilised by the ashes, the undergrowth sprang up more luxuriantly than ever. But it brought with it the greatest curse of the rainy season in the jungle. Every twig, every leaf, every blade of grass, harboured leeches, thin threads of black and yellow which waved one end in the air and seemed to scent an approaching prey. Walk over the grass, brush past the bushes, and a dozen of these pests fastened on you. Through the lace-holes of one's boots, between the folds of putties, down one's collar they insinuated themselves unnoticed; and you did not feel them until, bloated with blood and swollen to an enormous size, they were perceptible to the touch under the clothing. After a walk one was obliged, on returning to the bungalow, to undress and was sure to find several leeches fastened to one's body. I saw one sepoy with a leech firmly fixed in his nostril. Another time I noticed a man's shirt sleeve stained with blood from elbow to wrist, and, on examining the arm, discovered that, unknown to the sepoy, two leeches were fastened on it and had punctured veins.
Sometimes hailstorms alternated with the rain. I had heard stories of the size of the hailstones in the Duars. Planters had assured me that animals were often killed and the corrugated iron roofs of the factories perforated by them. I declined to credit these assertions; although in other parts of India I have seen hailstones an inch in diameter. But one night in Buxa, while we were at dinner, a hailstorm rattled on the roof of the bungalow; and I really believe that if this had not been made of thick sheets of iron it would have been drilled through. My orderly picked up one hailstone outside and brought it in to us. We passed it from hand to hand; and then it occurred to me to measure it. It was a rectangular block of clear ice containing as a core a round, whitish hailstone of the usual size and shape; and, using the tape and compass, we found it was two and a quarter inches long, one and a half broad, and one inch thick. And this after it had lain for a few minutes on the ground and had been handled by several persons. Next day a native survey party, under the command of a European, arrived in Buxa on its way to inspect the boundary marks along the Bhutan frontier, as these are frequently moved back into our territory by the wily Bhutanese. The Englishman in charge told me that he had been caught by the fringe of this storm on the previous evening. He had only a few yards to run for shelter but put up his umbrella as he did so. It was drilled through by the hailstones as if they had been bullets. I heard afterwards of several animals killed in the hills by this storm.
Shut up in our small Station by the relentless rain the days passed wearily during the long wet months. Often in the afternoon the rain ceased for a couple of hours; and we were able to get out for a little exercise. So steep were the slopes, so rocky the soil, that in half an hour after the cessation of the downpour the road and the parade ground were comparatively dry. But we could not wander off them without the risk of being attacked by scores of leeches.
In July came a break of nearly a week. I took advantage of it to descend into the forest. Wonderful was the transformation there! No longer could I complain that there was no shelter for game. The undergrowth was higher and denser than ever. Save for an occasional blackened tree-trunk, half hidden in the greenery, there was no trace of the devastation wrought by the fires. The ashes had only served to fertilise the ground, and the vegetation pushed more vigorously than ever. Orchids again clothed the boughs. And, sporting in the unusual sunshine, myriads of gorgeous tropical butterflies, scarlet and black, peacock-green, pale blue, yellow, all the colours imaginable, rose up in clouds before my elephant. The creepers again swinging from stem to stem writhed and twisted in fantastic confusion. The rivers were in flood and rolled their masses of brown, foam-flecked water to the south.
Despite the awful storms I saw no trace in the forest or the hills of damage wrought by lightning. When we arrived in Buxa I had thought the buildings well protected, as conductors ran down every chimney in bungalow and barrack. But just before the Rains an engineer of the Public Works Department had visited us to inspect them. To my alarm he informed me that none of them were properly insulated, and that so far from being a safeguard, they were a positive danger. Then, having cheered me by saying that possibly in a year or two his Department would put them to rights, he left. So when the thunderstorms broke over us I used to wonder in pained resignation which building would be the first struck. But we weathered them all successfully. Probably the hills around saved us by attracting the electric fluid.
Our brief glimpse of fine weather was soon gone. Then the clouds rolled up from the sea before the breath of the south-west Monsoons, the storms again assailed us, and the floodgates of the sky were opened once more. In England one complains of the dullness of a wet summer. Think of five months' incessant rain in a small Station that never boasted more than three European inhabitants, cut off from the world and thrown entirely on their own resources! Smith had long since left us and we had no doctor. In the middle of the Rains Creagh was ordered off to command the Trade Agent's escort in Gyantse in Tibet; and I was left the only white man in Buxa. Life was not gay. Even the relief of work was denied us; and sport was impossible, for malaria and blackwater fever hold possession of the jungles during the Monsoon. And even when the Rains moderated in September, we were not allowed to shoot until the close season ended in October. The wet season is not really over in India until near the beginning of November; and in Buxa we sometimes had rain in that month and in December.
But still we managed to survive the trial by fire and by water; and the winter found us as ready for work and sport as ever.