Outside, on the surging pavements, a small boy cried: ‘Paper! Evenin’ paper!’ Then seductively: ’Kargus!’
‘What?’ I said, thinking my ears had cheated me.
‘Dekko! Kargus!’ said he. (’Look here! Paper!’)
‘Why on earth d’you say that?’
‘Because the men like it,’ he replied, and slapped an evening paper (no change for a penny) into the hand of a man in a helmet.
Who shall say that the English are not adaptable?
The car swam bonnet-deep through a mile of troops; and a mile up the road one could hear the deep hum of all those crowded streets that the cathedral bells were chiming over. It was only one small block of Anglo-India getting ready to take its place in the all-devouring Line.
SCREW-GUNS
An hour later at —— (Shall we ever be able to name people and places outright again?) the wind brought up one whiff—one unmistakable whiff—of ghi. Somewhere among the English pines that, for the moment, pretended to be the lower slopes of the Dun, there were native troops. A mule squealed in the dark and set off half-a-dozen others. It was screw-guns—batteries of them, waiting their turn also at the game. Morning showed them in their immaculate lines as though they had just marched in from Jutogh—little, low guns with their ammunition; very big English gunners in disengaged attitudes which, nevertheless, did not encourage stray civilians to poke and peer into things; and the native drivers all busied over their charges. True, the wind was bitter, and many of the drivers had tied up their heads, but so one does at Quetta in the cold weather—not to mention Peshawur—and, said a naik of drivers: ‘It is not the cold for which we have no liking. It is the wet. The English air is good, but water falls at all seasons. Yet notwithstanding, we of this battery (and, oh, the pride men can throw into a mere number!) have not lost one mule. Neither at sea nor on land have we one lost. That can be shown, sahib.’
Then one heard the deep racking tobacco-cough in the lee of a tent where four or five men—Kangra folk by the look of them—were drinking tobacco out of a cow’s horn. Their own country’s tobacco, be sure, for English tobacco.... But there was no need to explain. Who would have dreamed to smell bazar-tobacco on a south country golf links?