Felow beechcomer:—
Missed the train to Bina becaze I knoked the block off a nigger polisman. They draged me down hear and the comish finned me 15 dibs and then payed the fine and put me rite as far as Agra. I wil pick you up ther on the 27th.
Yours,
Busted Head.
The twenty-seventh was past. The ex-pearl-fisher had evidently gone on, and I saw him no more.
Reduced now to a handful of coppers, I lost no time in seeking out the photographer to whom my “chit” was addressed. He was a Parsee of slender build, dressed in European garb, the trousers of which, fitting his long legs all too snugly, gave him a strangely spiderlike appearance. A small velvet skull-cap, embroidered in red and pink with representations of flowers and leaves, sat imperturbable on the top of his head, holding its place with every movement of his lithe body as if nailed there. Suggestion was there none, in his mien, of strange religious beliefs. His English was fluent, his manner affable, yet tempered with a ceremonial coldness, as of one convinced of the necessity of being ever on his dignity.
We came quickly to terms. The shop, well stocked with photographic supplies, was in charge of a Eurasian clerk, and my new duties confined me within the narrow limits of the dark-room. He who would taste purgatory has but to find employment in a photographer’s workshop in India. As the door closed behind me, I muttered a determination to hold my new-found position for a fortnight. Before the first set of plates had been transferred to the fixing-bath, the resolution weakened; when an hour had passed, a voice within me whispered that three days’ wages would be amply sufficient for all present needs. There were new elements of the photographer’s craft to be learned in the Parsee’s laboratory, too, such as the use of ice in every process, and during the learning I conducted, all unintentionally, a series of researches in the action of NaCl on the various chemicals in my charge. In short, the stoke-hole of an ocean-liner would have been hibernal by comparison. My employer’s tap on the door, with the suggestion that it was time to set up the shutters, did not need to be repeated.
Once in the street, the Parsee hailed a Hindu hansom, a sort of stranded ferryboat set up on two circular table-tops and attached to what had once been a pair of bullocks, and we were driven off. That we reached the residence of my employer before morning and in good health was reason for self-congratulation, for it was nearly a mile distant. The axle-grooves in the misapplied table-tops were as near the center as if they had been bored by a musket in the hands of a blind man at one hundred paces. The driver was with great difficulty inspired to action, and was totally incapable of transmitting such inspiration to his animals. Along the boulevard the craft moved at the cumbersome gait of a land crab; in the rougher streets it pitched and rolled like a derelict in the trough of the waves.
The Taj Mahal, Agra, India