On their left the Haiderabad express roared away, following the night, its course upon the parallel ribbons of shining steel marked by a towering pillar of dust. On their right, beyond the sharp-cut edge of the world, the sun had kindled a mighty conflagration in the skies. On every hand, behind and before them, the desert lay in ebbing shadows, a rolling waste seared by arid nullahs—the bone-dry beds of long-forgotten streams. Off in the north the hills cropped up and stole purposelessly away over the horizon.
They stood, then, forlorn in a howling desolation. For signs of life they had the station, a flimsy shelter roofed with corrugated iron, a beaten track that wandered off northwards and disappeared over a grassless swell, a handful of mud huts at a distance, and the ticket-agent. The latter a sleepy, surly Eurasian in pyjamas, surveyed them listlessly from the threshold of the station, and without a sign either of interest or contempt turned and locked himself in.
Amber sat down on his upturned suit-case and laughed and lit a cigarette. Doggott growled. The noise of the train died to silence in the distance, and a hyena came out of nowhere, exhibited himself upon the ridge of a dry desert swell, and mocked them sardonically. Then he, like the ticket-agent, went away, leaving an oppressive silence.
Presently the sun rose in glory and sent its burning level rays to cast a shadow several rods long of an enraged American beating frantically with clenched fists upon the door of an unresponsive railway station.
He hammered until he was a-weary, then deputised his task to Doggott, who resourcefully found him a stone of size and proceeded to make dents in the door. This method elicited the Eurasian. He came out, listened attentively to abuse and languidly to their demands for a tonga to bear them to Kuttarpur, and observed that the mail tonga left once a day—at three in the afternoon. Doggott caught him as he was on the point of returning to his interrupted repose and called his attention to the unwisdom of his ways.
Apparently convinced, this ticket-agent announced his intention of endeavouring to find a tonga for the sahib. Besides, he was not unwilling to acquire rupees. He scowled thoughtfully at Amber, ferociously at Doggott, went back into the station, gossipped casually with the telegraph sounder for a quarter of an hour, and finally reappearing, without a word or a nod left the platform for the road and walked and walked and walked and walked. Within thirty yards his figure was blurred by the dance of new-born heat devils. Within a hundred he disappeared; the desert swallowed him up.
An hour passed as three. The heat became terrific; not a breath of wind stirred. The face of the world lost its contours in wavering mirage. The travellers found lukewarm water in the station and breakfasted sparingly from their own stores of biscuit and tinned things. Then, in the shadow of the station, they settled down to wait, bored to extinction. Lulled by the hushed chatter of the telegraph sounder, Doggott nodded and slept audibly; Amber nodded, felt himself going, roused with a struggle, and lapsed into a dreary mid-world of semi-stupor.
In the simple fulness of Asiatic time a tonga came from Heaven knew where and roused him by rattling up beside the platform. He got up and looked it over with a just eye and a temper none the sweeter for his experience. It was a brute of a tonga, a patched and ramshackle wreck of what had once been a real tonga, with no top to protect the travellers from the sun, and accommodation only for three, including the driver.
The Eurasian ticket-agent alighted and solicited rupees. He got them and with them Amber's unvarnished opinion of the tonga; something which was not received with civility by the driver.
He remained in his seat—a short, swart native with an evil countenance and, across his knees, a sheathed tulwar—arguing with Amber in broken English and, abusing him scandalously in impurest Hindi, flinging at him in silken tones untranslatable scraps of bazaar Billingsgate. For, as he explained in an audible aside to the ticket-agent, this sahib was an outlander and, being as ignorant as most sahibs, could not understand Hindi. At this the Eurasian turned away to hide a grin of delight and the driver winked deliberately at Amber the while he broadly sketched for him his ancestry and the manner of his life at home and abroad.