"Captain Humphreys' quarters are next door," we told him. "They gave us more trouble to find a title for. When we thought that the brigade major, Major Hutchinson, was to accompany you, the name suggested itself—we'd have called it 'The Hutch.' But when we heard that Humphreys was coming instead we were puzzled—until the idea occurred to us to name it 'The 'Ump.'"
The General seemed to appreciate the mild joke more than his staff officer did. I pulled up the cane blind on the door of "The Bower" and invited the General to enter and see his jungle abode.
"Here, sir, is your hat-rack," I said, showing a bamboo pole stuck in the flooring, its top split open into several points held apart by a cone of wood, thus providing a number of pegs. I drew his attention to an ingeniously-made writing-table with pigeon-holes and drawers. Then we passed into the inner room. Here a comfortable bed had been formed by driving the ends of six forked sticks, arranged in a parallelogram, into the earth. In the forks four light poles had been laid and fastened, making the head, foot and sides of the bedstead. Then across from side to side were tied split bamboos, which formed a bottom as elastic as steel springs. On it was laid a grass mat, three inches thick, as a mattress. The best bed ever turned out by Maple's could not have been more comfortable. Against the walls stood a bamboo dressing-table and a washstand. On the latter was an enamelled iron basin, the only article I could not replace from the jungle. But above it hung a length of hollow bamboo filled with water and pierced near the bottom by a hole now plugged. I withdrew the plug; and the water poured down into the basin.
The General gazed around admiringly.
"These contrivances are very clever," he said; "and there is no doubt that now your sepoys know how to make themselves and their officers very comfortable with the help only of jungle materials. All this is very ingenious and practical."
After lunch the General inspected the defences and asked to see the sepoys man them. I led him up the ladder into the machân or platform occupied by the sentry in a tree over the river-bank. The men were all shut up in their huts.
"Give the alarm," I said to the sentry.
He gathered in his hand the strings leading from the machân to the officers' and section-leaders' quarters and pulled them. Throughout the fort we could faintly hear the stones rattling in the suspended tins. Instantly the fronts of the huts were raised; and the men of each section came silently out in line and went straight to the loopholes they had been posted to.
"That is the best device I have seen yet," said General Bower. "The whole camp can be simultaneously aroused at once without any noise being heard by an approaching enemy, who would remain in ignorance of the fact that the defenders were on the alert. Consequently they would come on confidently in fancied security until they exposed themselves to a sudden fire at close range."
Climbing down from the machân he inspected the booby trap. At a signal, men inside the wall cut the creepers supporting the outer end of the bamboo platform which fell on its hinges and sent an avalanche of rocks into the nullah below.