"Hazúr, behold!—The cloud will pass." His teeth flashed out exultant. "A good tale is not to be bought with cowries; and we shall tell this one in India before many weeks be out."
Chundra Sen was right. With astonishing swiftness the twilight paled from grey to white; a streak of spectral sunlight quivered through, like life creeping back into the face of death; and the cloud rolled harmlessly over into the Yarkhun valley behind them.
It was but a herald of the great battalion that billowed up an hour later, enveloping glacier, peak, and crag, and sealing up the pass for seven months to come.
But by then, they were clattering recklessly down the slope, helter-skelter, like a pack of children let out of school; slithering over fissured glacier and moraine, sending loose boulders flying from rock to rock; the Gurkhas shouting and laughing, the Kashmiri coolies breaking into weird snatches of song. Even The Rat lost his sober little head, and in scuttling over a glacier slope sat suddenly down upon his tail, dog fashion, landing Lenox on his feet, and sliding away from under him, to the vociferous delight of every one but himself. Only the two Pathans and the Scot accepted reprieve as imperturbably as they had accepted sentence of death; suggesting by their silence, in the midst of excitement, the large reserves of strength common to the natures of both.
Before five they had sighted the willows and poplars of Darkót; and by sunset they were encamped outside the village, walled in with a rugged amphitheatre of granite and limestone cliffs. Here they found the man in charge of the welcome caravan of supplies and heavy baggage, taking his ease, a little puzzled, yet in no wise troubled at the Sahib's delay.
Lenox, broken with fatigue, relief, and incipient illness, realised, as he sank into his camp chair, that throughout the past week he had kept himself going by pure force of will. And his record was a fair one, even as Frontier records go:—incessant marching in wet clothes, on a minimum of food, culminating in ten hours of severe exposure and the acutest anxiety he had ever known. And over and above all such incidentals of the day's work,—achievement, in full measure, of that which he had set out to do; not merely in respect of his mission, but in respect of that hidden struggle and victory, 'that weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount.' For he knew now that by the God-given power of sheer, unwearied resistance he had vanquished an evil the most insidious and alluring that can assail a man; knew that he had put the accursed thing under his feet; and he meant to keep it there.
But the struggle, combined with hardship and privation, had left its mark on him. The protests of Nature had been disregarded; and now she took her revenge in the sledge-hammer fashion that is hers.
By next morning the man's skin was like hot parchment, his limbs rigid with pain, his brain verging on delirium; and before evening it was clear that rheumatic fever had him in its relentless grip.
The Gurkhas and Zyarulla were in despair. Chundra Sen, goaded by responsibility for the safety of his officer, set out, straightway, by double marches for Srinagar, determined to cover the distance in ten days; while the Pathan, commanding a charpoy[1] from the headman of the village, remained to exorcise the 'fever devil' with the rude skill and limitless patience of his kind.
But he reaped small reward for his pains. Racked with rheumatism and burnt up with fever, Lenox had almost reached the end of his tether; and through the awful hours of delirium, Zyarulla could only crouch, helpless, by the bedside; listening, listening to the hoarse, hurried mutterings, of which he could understand nothing beyond the frequent recurrence of the Mem-sahib's name.