Again the old familiar sound of the cantonment ghurries, or gong-bells, as they were clanged for the change of sentries, was in his ear, and the view from the open windows of the bungalow was strange and striking.
Far away above the misty horizon rose amid the clouds—and cloudlike themselves, so bright and varied were their tints—the majestic mountains that tower between the shallow valley of Jellalabad and the ramparts of Cabul, and chief of them is the stupendous Suffaidh Koh, fourteen thousand feet in height, then covered with dazzling white snow; and if wondrously beautiful by day, it was perhaps still more so by night, when the full moon lit up its chasms and peaks with its Asiatic splendour.
In the immediate foreground, just before the windows of the bungalow, a curious scene—one illustrative of the distant region and the manners of our Indian fellow-subjects—was in progress.
The Poojah of a battalion of H.M. Native Infantry, a Hindoo regiment, was being celebrated towards evening.
The battalion, in full marching order, with its colours, was drawn up in a circle. At each cardinal point of the compass was a small clod of earth, with barley and rice on it; and in the centre were the attendant Brahmins with a beautiful young goat, which had been sprinkled with pure water, barley, and rice. Then the sacrificer drew a huge Ghoorkali knife, and, after muttering some prayers, by one trenchant slash severed the head of the goat from its body. At the moment of immolation twelve guns boomed through the air and drums were beaten, after which the battalion was wheeled back into line, and marched by fours into its lines, with band playing and colours flying.
Colonel Spatterdash, Colville's host, was a thorough Indian officer of the old school, who had broiled for so many years in Bengal that he had lost much of his European identity, all memory of home nearly, and religion too, and had become so bronzed that evil-disposed fellows used to hint—but not in his presence—that he had 'a dash of the tar-brush in him—was fourteen annas to the rupee,' and so forth.
The wags of the station at Chutneypore declared that he wore a gold bangle given to him by the orange-visaged Rani of that place, who liked him as 'a wicked old man,' that squeezed her brown paws when he assisted her into the silk-curtained howdah of her great tusker elephant, which had carried 'Colonel Wellesley's' baggage at the battle of Assaye.
He was full of old Indian memories of the Rangoon Rangers and Bhurtpore Bulldogs, as he had heard of them when he came out from Addiscombe a cadet and griffin; and had many a story to tell of the pre-railway times, when, if not marching, people travelled by dâk, night and day, in palanquins; when the old Bengal colonel was a father to his regiment, the guide of his subalterns, and was never so happy as when he had a dozen or so at his table, all eager for Kowab, fresh eggs, with Phillibut rice, kedgere, &c., and Bhola in plenty.
He was a captain when the mutiny occurred; and its horrors, with the dismay that his beloved Sepoys—the Spatterdash-ka-Pultan, so-called from his father—should prove untrue to their salt, nearly broke his heart; and he thought the end of the world had come when they flung him down a well at Gungawallah; but he was hard to kill. A banyan-tree that grew half way down broke his fall, and to that he clung till rescued by some Highlanders, after which he solaced himself mightily by blowing whole batches of 'pandies' from his guns.
And now tiffin came, curried chickens, rice, green chillis, mutton and chutney, &c., &c., with plenty of wine and brandy, all laid out by his faithful old Kitmutgar, wearing an enormous white turban.