II
It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance—notably about a fish that jumped in a way-side pond. “Now I know,” he shouted, “how God puts them there! First He makes them up above and then He drops them down. That was a new one.” Then, lifting his head to the stars, he cried: “Oh, God, do it again, but slowly, so that I, Adam, may see.”
But nothing happened, and the doolie-bearers lit the noisome, dripping rag-torches, and Adam’s eyes shone big in the dancing light, and we smelt the dry dust of the plains that we were leaving after eleven months’ hard work.
At stated times the men ceased their drowsy, grunting tune, and sat down for a smoke. Between the guttering of their water-pipes we could hear the cries of the beasts of the night, and the wind stirring in the folds of the mountain ahead. At the changing-station the voice of Adam, the First of Men, would be lifted to rouse the sleepers in the huts till the fresh relay of bearers shambled from their cots and the relief pony with them.
Then we would re-form and go on, and by the time the moon rose Adam was asleep, and there was no sound in the night except the grunting of the men, the husky murmur of some river a thousand feet down in the valley, and the squeaking of Strickland’s saddle. So we went up from date-palm to deodar, till the dawn wind came round a corner all fresh from the snows, and we snuffed it. I heard Strickland say, “Wife, my overcoat, please,” and Adam, fretfully, “Where is Dalhousie and the cow’s child?” Then I slept till Strickland turned me out of the warm doolie at seven o’clock, and I stepped into all the splendour of a cool Hill day, the Plains sweltering twenty miles back and four thousand feet below. Adam waked too, and needs must ride in front of me to ask a million questions, and shout at the monkeys and clap his hands when the painted pheasants bolted across our road, and hail every woodcutter and drover and pilgrim within sight, till we halted for breakfast at a rest house. After that, being a child, he went out to play with a train of bullock-drivers halted by the roadside, and we had to chase him out of a native liquor shop, where he was bargaining with a native seven-year-old for a parrot in a bamboo cage.
Said he, wriggling on my pommel as we went on again, “There were four men behosh [insensible] at the back of that house. Wherefore do men grow behosh from drinking?”
“It is the nature of the waters,” I said, and, calling back, “Strick, what’s that grog-shop doing so close to the road? It’s a temptation to any one’s servants.”
“Dunno,” said a sleepy voice in the doolie. “This is Kennedy’s District. ’Twasn’t here in my time.”
“Truly the waters smell bad,” Adam went on. “I smelt them, but I did not get the parrot even for six annas. The woman of the house gave me a love gift that I found playing near the verandah.”
“And what was the gift, Father Adam?”