The lowest and nearest to the parade ground of these was the Commanding Officer's Quarters, which I occupied. Higher up to the right, and separated from mine by a deep ravine crossed by a little wooden bridge, was an empty house, known as Married Officers' Quarters. Behind it was a long wooden building raised on pillars, the forest officer's bungalow, to shelter that official in his annual visit. Around it were a few bamboo huts for his native clerks. Past my quarters ran the mountain road which climbed the steep sides of Sinchula, and, degenerating into a narrow mule track, wound round it to the Bhutan frontier. Near my house it was shaded by mango trees which, when the fruit was ripe, were very popular with the wild monkeys. To preserve the mangoes for ourselves, I was then obliged to station a sentry on the road at daybreak to keep the marauders off. In my garden stood a very large mango tree, up which I used in the season to send a small Bhuttia boy to gather the fruit. One day he found a large monkey there before him. It attacked him savagely and I was obliged to shoot it to save him from its fury.
A hundred feet above my house and on the left of the road stood in a terraced garden the Officers' Mess, occupied by my subaltern and the doctor. And three hundred feet higher still was the last building in Buxa, the Circuit House, intended as a court-house and temporary residence for any civil official who should chance to come there on duty. The three white square towers, which stood on the spurs running down from Sinchula were known as the Picquet Towers, and, conspicuous against the dark mountains could be seen for many miles from the plains below. They were intended to contain in war time small parties of the garrison and hold points which commanded the fort at close range. From one above the east face of the fort even arrows could be shot into the interior of our defences; so its possession was a necessity to us. They were strongly built of stone and loopholed, the door eight feet from the ground, and reached by a ladder, windowless, the only light coming from the loopholes. To the west of the fort beyond the mountain road and behind another spur, was the bazaar or native town, which consisted of a dozen wooden huts, and three or four brick houses, in which lived the few bunniahs or merchants who resided there to trade grain, salt, and cloth, with the Bhutanese across the border. There were hardly thirty natives in the bazaar, comprising our whole civil population. The "shops" in the one tiny street contained little of use, even for our sepoys' frugal needs, and nothing for ours; so that anything we required had to be sent for from Calcutta—a day and a night by train.
BUXA DUAR. My bungalow in the foreground; the Officers' Mess among the trees.
"THE FORT WAS BUILT ON A KNOLL."
Beside the bazaar was the European cemetery, a mournful enclosure which was dotted with ruinous tombstones of British officers who had been killed or died of disease in this solitary outpost. The most recent grave was that of a former forest officer of Rajabhatkawa who, unable to bear the loneliness of his isolated life, had shot himself in his house in the jungle below. But before our detachment left Buxa another grave was dug here to hold the body of a young captain of my regiment. Though he died of disease, with no doctor there at the time to attend him, yet it was in reality loneliness that killed him; for, depressed by the solitude, he had no heart in him to fight against illness. But the far-flung boundaries of England's Empire are marked everywhere by graves like his.
From the south wall of the fort the ground fell in wooded spurs and rocky cliffs to the forest fifteen hundred feet below. East and west the interminable miles of trees ran on beyond the range of sight, clothing the foot-hills and climbing the steep mountain sides. Here and there a light green island in the darker-hued sea of foliage showed where a tea garden lay in a clearing, the iron-roofed factories, and the planters' bungalows visible through a field-glass. But to the south, beyond the clearly defined edge of the forest, the cultivated plains of Eastern Bengal stretched unbroken to Calcutta—three hundred miles away. South-west, in the Rains when the Indian atmosphere is clearest, we could see the Garo Hills fifty miles away in Assam, lying beyond the broad Brahmaputra where it flows to join the Ganges and pour their united waters through a hundred mouths into the Bay of Bengal—close on four hundred miles to the south of us.