We awoke him quickly. He sprang to his feet with a frightened “achá, sahib, pawnee hai,” and ran to fetch a chettie of water, not because we had asked for it, but because he knew the first requirement of travelers in the tropics.
“Now we would eat, oh, chowkee dar,” said James, in Hindustanee, “julty karow.”
“Achá, sahib,” repeated the cook. He tossed a few fagots on the fire, set a kettle over them, emptied into it the contents of another chettie, and, catching up a blazing stick, trotted with a loose-kneed wabble to the third hut. There sounded one long-drawn squawk, a muffled cackling of hens, and the Hindu returned, holding a chicken by the head and swinging it round and round as he ran. Catching up a knife, he slashed the fowl from throat to tail, snatched off skin and feathers with a few dexterous jerks, and less than three minutes after his awakening, our supper was cooking. Truly, the serving of sahibs had imbued him with an unoriental energy.
We returned to the veranda, followed by the chokee dar, who lighted a decrepit lamp on the table within and trotted away into the jungle. He came back at the heels of a native in multicolored garb of startling brilliancy, who introduced himself as the custodian, and, squatting on his haunches in a veranda chair, took up his duties as entertainer of guests. There was not another that spoke English within a day’s journey, he assured us, swelling with pride; and for that we were duly thankful. Long after the cook had carried away the plates and the chicken bones, the babu chattered on, drawing upon an apparently unlimited fund of misinformation, and jumping, as each topic was exhausted, to a totally irrelevant one, without a pause either for breath or ideas. Fortunately, he had arrived with the notion that we were surveyors of the new line, and we took good care not to undeceive him; for railway officials were entitled to the accommodations of dak bungalows without payment of the government fee. We still had a few coppers left, therefore, when the cook had been satisfied, and, driving off the inexhaustible keeper, we rolled our jackets and shoes into two “beachcomber’s pillows” and turned in.
We slept an hour or two, perhaps, during the night. Of all the hardships that befall the wayfarer in British-India, none grows more unendurable than this—to be kept awake when he most needs sleep. Either his resting place—to call it a bed would be worse than inaccurate—is too hard, or the heat so sultry that the perspiration trickles along his ribs, tickling him into wakefulness. If a band of natives is not chattering under his windows, a fellow roadster snoring beside him, or a flock of roosters greeting every newborn star, there are a dozen lizards at least to make the night miserable.
The dak bungalow in the wilderness housed a whole army of these pests; great, green-eyed reptiles from six inches to a foot long. Barely was the lamp extinguished, when one in the ceiling struck up his refrain, another on the wall beside me joined in, two more in a corner gave answering cry, and the night concert was on:—
“She-kak! she-kak! she-kak!”
Don’t fancy for a moment that the cry of the Indian lizard is the half-audible murmur of the cricket or the tree toad. It sounds much more like the squawking of an ungreased bullock-cart:—
“She-kak! she-kak! she-kak!”
To attempt to drive them off was worse than useless. The walls and ceiling, being of thatch, offered more hiding places for creeping things than a hay stack. When I fired a shoe at the nearest, a shower of branches and rubbish rattled to the floor; and, after a moment of silence, the song began again, louder than before. Either the creatures were clever dodgers or invulnerable, and there was always the danger that a swiftly-thrown missile might bring down half the thatch partition:—