“I would you had not lost Bahadur Shah’s pass, huzoor,” he said. “That would be worth a bagful of gold mohurs on the north road now. But, as matters stand, we must fall back on walnut juice. You have blue eyes and fair hair, alack, yet must we—”
“What! Wouldst thou make me a brother of thine?” demanded Malcolm, understanding that the walnut juice was intended to darken his skin.
“There is no other way, huzoor. This is no ride of a night. We shall be seven days, let us go at the best, and meeting budmashes at every mile. If you did not talk Urdu like one of us, sahib, I should bid you die here in peace rather than fall in the first village. Still, we may have luck, and you can bandage your hair and forehead and swear that those cursed Feringhis nearly cut your scalp off. But you must be rubbed all over, sahib, until you are the color of brown leather, for we can have no patches of white skin showing where, perchance, your garments are rent.”
Malcolm saw the wisdom of the suggestion and fell in with it. While Chumru went to compound walnut juice in the nearest bazaar, he, in pursuance of the plan they had concocted together, got a native writer to compile a letter which purported to emanate from Nana Sahib, and was addressed to Bahadur Shah. It was a very convincing document. Malcolm contributed a garbled history of recent events, and one of the Brahmin’s seals, which came into Havelock’s possession when Cawnpore was occupied, lent verisimilitude to the script.
Then the Englishman covered himself with an oily compound that Chumru assured him would darken his skin effectually before morning, though the present effect was more obvious to the nose than to the eye. Chumru donned his rissaldar Brahmin’s uniform and Malcolm secured a similar outfit from a native officer on the staff. Well-armed and well-mounted the pair crossed the Ganges north of Bithoor, gained the Grand Trunk Road and were far from the British column when they drew rein for their first halt of more than an hour’s duration.
They had adventures galore on the road to Delhi, but Chumru’s repertory of oaths anent the Nazarenes, and Malcolm’s dignified hauteur as a messenger of the man who ranked higher in the native world than the octogenarian king, carried them through without grave risk. True, they had a close shave or two.
Once a suspicious sepoy who knew every native officer in the 7th Cavalry, to which corps “Rissaldar Ali Khan” was supposed to belong, had to be quietly choked to death within earshot of a score of his own comrades who were marching to the Mogul capital. On another occasion, a moulvie, or Mohammedan priest, was nearly the cause of their undoing. Malcolm was not sufficiently expert in the ritual of the Rêka and this shortcoming aroused the devotee’s ire, but he was calmed by Chumru’s assurance that his excellent friend, Laiq Ahmed, was still suffering from the wound inflicted by the condemned Giaours, and the storm blew over.
These incidents simply served to enliven a tedious journey. Its main features were climatic discomfort and positive starvation. Rain storms, hot winds, sweltering intervals of intolerable heat—these were vagaries of nature and might be endured. But the absence of food was a more serious matter. The passage to and fro of rebel detachments had converted the Grand Trunk Road into a wilderness. The sepoys paid for nothing and looted Mohammedans and Hindus alike. After two months of constant pilfering the unhappy ryots had little left. For the most part they deserted their hovels, gathered such few valuables as had escaped the human locusts who devoured their substance, and either retreated to remote villages or boldly sought a living in some other province. Indeed, it may be said in all candor that the Mutiny caused far more misery to the great mass of the people than to the foreign rulers against whom it was supposed to be directed. The sufferings of the English residents in India were terrible and the treatment meted out to them was unspeakably vile, but for one English life sacrificed during the country’s red year there were five hundred natives killed by the very men who professed to defend their interests.
Malcolm and Chumru were given proof in plenty of this fact as they rode along. Generations of local feuds had taught the villagers to construct their rude shanties in such wise that any place of fairly large population formed a strong fort. Where the ryots were collected in sufficient numbers to render such a proceeding possible, they armed themselves not only against the British but against all the world.