He was up at daybreak; for the tide served in the early morning and only at its height could the launch approach the shore, which at low water was bordered with the filthy slime of mangrove swamps.
Landed at the other side of the gulf he had even a worse experience of travel before him than on the previous day. For the next stage of the journey was forty miles across a salt desert in a tram drawn by a camel. The car was open on all sides and covered by a cardboard roof; and its wooden seats were uncomfortably hard for long hours of sitting. The heat was appalling. It struck up from the baked ground and seemed to scorch the body through the clothes. The glare from the white sand and even whiter patches of salt was blinding and penetrated through the closed eyelids. A hot wind blew over the hazy, shimmering desert, setting the whirling dust-devils dancing and striking the face like the touch of a heated iron. Wargrave's small store of ice and mineral water was exhausted, and he felt that he was likely to die of thirst. For in the villages where they changed camels cholera was raging; and he dared not drink the water from their wells.
The tram slid easily along the shining rails that stretched away out of sight over the monotonous plain, the camel loping lazily along, its soft, sprawling feet falling noiselessly on the sand. The last ten miles of the way lay through less sterile country; and the tram passed herds of black buck—the pretty, spiral-horned antelope. Used to its daily passage, the graceful animals, which were protected by the game-laws of the native State through which the line ran, barely troubled to move out of its way. They stood about in hundreds, staring lazily at it, some not ten yards off, the bucks turning their heads away to scratch their sides with the points of their horns or rubbing their noses with dainty hoofs.
That night Wargrave slept at a dâk-bungalow near the terminus in a little native town with a small branch-railway connecting it with a main line. Then for four days he travelled across the scorching plains of India, shut up in stuffy carriages with violet-hued glass windows and Venetian wooden shutters meant to exclude the heat and glare. Over bare plains broken by sudden flat-topped rocky hills, through closely-cultivated fields and stretches of scrub-jungle, by mud-walled villages, he journeyed day and night. The train crossed countless wide river-beds in which the streams had shrunk to mean rivulets; but when it clattered over the Ganges at Allahabad the sacred flood rolled a broad and sluggish current under the bridge on its way to the far-distant Bay of Bengal.
On the fourth night Wargrave slept on a bench in the waiting-room of a small junction, Niralda, from which a narrow-gauge railway branched off to the north from the main line through Eastern Bengal. At an early hour next morning he took his seat in the one first-class carriage of the toy train, which journeyed through typical Bengal scenery by mud-banked rice-fields, groves of tall, feathery bamboos and hamlets of pretty palm-thatched huts, their roofs hidden by the broad green leaves of sprawling creepers. Soon across the sky to the north a dark, blurred line rose, stretching out of sight east and west. It grew clearer as the train sped on, more distinct. It was the great northern rampart of India, the Himalayas. Then, seeming to float in air high above the highest of the dark mountain peaks and utterly detached from them, the white crests of the Eternal Snows shone fairy-like against the blue sky.
As Wargrave gazed enraptured, suddenly hills and plain were shut out from his sight as the train plunged from the dazzling sunlight into the deep shadows of a tropical forest. And the subaltern recognised with a thrill of delight that he was entering the wonderful Terai Jungle, the marvelous belt of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of the Himalayas through Assam and Bengal to the far Siwalik range, clothing their lower slopes or scaling their steep sides into Nepal and Bhutan. Deep in its recesses the rhinoceros, bison and buffalo hide, herds of wild elephants roam, tigers prey on the countless deer, and the great mountain bears descend to prowl in it for food. Frank had learned on the way that Ranga Duar was practically situated in it; and the knowledge almost consoled him for his exile in the promise of sport that kings might envy.
At a small wayside station in a clearing in the forest his railway journey ended. Beside the one small stone building two elephants were standing, incessantly swinging their trunks, flapping their ears and shifting their weight restlessly from leg to leg. Frank, on getting out of his carriage, learned with pleasure from their salaaming mahouts (drivers) that these animals were to be his next means of transport, a novel one that harmonised with the surroundings. On the back of each great beast was a massive, straw-filled pad secured by a rope passing surcingle-wise around its body.
Each mahout carried a gun, one a heavy rifle, the other a double-barrelled fowling-piece, which they offered to Wargrave.
"Huzoor!" (the Presence—a polite mode of address in Hindustani), said one man, "the Burra Sahib (the Political Sahib) sends salaams and lends you these, as you might see something to shoot on the way."
"Oh, the Political Officer. Very kind of him, I'm sure," remarked the subaltern. "What is his name?"