‘He must not die yet, Pochul,’ said Jaffar Sahib; ‘what would the Sultaun say to us? Away! get some water; he may revive. This is only a faint, the effect of terror; he will soon speak again.’
The man obeyed the order, and brought water. They dashed some on Herbert’s face, and opening his lips, poured some between his tightly closed teeth. But it was in vain; he moved not, nor showed signs of life for a long while; and was it not that his body continued warm, they would have thought him dead. At length he sighed, and opening his eyes, gazed wildly around him. The effort was greeted with a shout from those about him, which he appeared not to hear, but sank back again insensible. Again they essayed to revive him as they best could; and after a long time partially succeeded as before; but it was only to see him relapse again and again. Once or twice he spoke, but incoherently.
For some hours he continued thus. At last a violent shivering commenced; and seeing him so affected (for the Jemadar had left them for a while, having given the men strict orders to look carefully to Herbert, and to remove him to their guardhouse), as they were aware he was a person of more than ordinary consequence, they used what means they could to alleviate his sufferings. One lent him his rozaee, or quilted counterpane; another kneaded his limbs or chafed his hands; a third heated cloths and applied them to his back and head. But it was in vain: the shivering continued, accompanied at times with dreadful sickness. After being in this state for awhile, he broke into a violent heat—a burning, exhausting heat—which excited him furiously. Now he raved wildly: he spoke sometimes in English, sometimes in Hindostanee; and as none of the men around him understood either, they held a hurried consultation among themselves, and came to the resolution of selecting one of the prisoners to remain with him, and minister to his wants. The office was gladly accepted by the man they chose, whose name was Bolton, and whom they fixed on because he had been seen in conversation with Herbert more than the rest, and could speak a few words of their language, Canarese, which he had learned where he had been last confined.
All that night was passed by the unfortunate young man in violent raving, the consequence of the raging fever which consumed him. He tossed incessantly to and fro in the small corded bed upon which he had been laid; now yelling forth, in the agony he suffered from his head, which he held with both his hands; and now moaning piteously, so that even the rough guards felt compassion for the young and helpless Englishman. ‘Water!’ was the only coherent word he could utter; the rest was a continued unintelligible muttering, in which some English words and names were sometimes faintly discernible.
Poor Bolton did what he could, but it was in vain; and when the Jemadar returned in the morning for the purpose of adding another victim to his last, he found Herbert in such a state as to alarm him; for the Sultaun had sworn he would have life for life if aught happened to him.
‘He must be removed instantly,’ he said. ‘Away, one of ye, for a dooly! Bring it to the foot of the rock—we will carry him down thither, and he must be removed to the town.’
In the end too he was merciful, for he took Bolton with him to attend on Herbert while he should live; it could not be long, he thought, for he raved incessantly, until exhaustion ensued, and he gained fresh strength for further frantic efforts.
And they left the fatal rock soon afterwards, the only two of that numerous company alive; nor was the fate of the rest long protracted. They were murdered as the rest had been; and the bleached bones and skulls, and fragments of clothes which had no shape to tell to whom they had belonged—for they had been stripped from the dead by the beaks of vultures and teeth of jackals—proved to those who long afterwards looked on the place, that the tales they had heard of the horrors of that fatal rock, and which they had in part disbelieved, were not unfounded.
It was on a mild and balmy evening that Herbert awoke to consciousness, about a week after he had been removed. He looked languidly around him, for he was so weak that even the effort he made to raise himself caused a giddy faintness; and for an instant the remembrance of his last conscious moment upon the brink of the precipice flashed across his mind, and he shuddered at the recollection of what he had seen. Again he looked around, but he was not upon the rock; the fatal and wretched abode in which he had passed five days—such days of enduring agony as he could not have believed it possible to sustain—with its bare walls scrawled all over with the names of its miserable inhabitants, and their care-worn, despairing, and almost maniac faces, were around him no longer. He lay in the open air, under the shade of a wide-spreading peepul-tree, upon a mound of earth surrounding a tomb; which, from its clean white-washed state, and the garlands of flowers which hung upon it, was evidently that of a Mahomedan saint or holy martyr. At a short distance was a small mosque, exquisitely white and clean, behind which rose some noble tamarind-trees, and with them cocoa-nut and plantains, which formed an appropriate background to the pureness of the building, their foliage partly shaded and intermingled with the minarets and ornamented pinnacles of the mosque. Before it was a little garden, where flourished luxuriantly a pomegranate-tree or two, covered with their bright scarlet blossoms—a few marigolds and cockscombs, intermixed with mint and other sweet herbs, which appeared to be cultivated with care. The space around the tomb and before the mosque, and for a considerable extent all round, was carefully swept; and the branches of the peepul and tamarind-trees, which met and interweaved high above, formed a cover impenetrable by the rays of the fiercest sun at noon-day; but it was now evening, and the red light streamed in a flood between the stems of the trees, lighting up the gnarled branches of the peepul and the thick foliage beyond. Innumerable parroquets and minas screamed and twittered in the branches above him, and flew from place to place restlessly: but the only sound of man was from one drawing water for the garden, by the aid of the lever and bucket common to Mysore, whose monotonous yet not unmusical song and mellow voice ceased only to allow the delicious sound of the rush of water to reach Herbert’s ear, as the bucket was emptied from time to time into the reservoir which supplied the garden.
He lay in a half unconscious state, in that dreamy languor, which, when fierce fever has subsided, is almost painful from its vagueness; when the mind, striving to recall the past, wanders away into thoughts which have no reference to it, but which lose themselves in a maze of unreal illusions too subtle and shifting to be followed, and yet too pleasant to excite aught but tranquil images and soothing effects.