CHAPTER XXIV.
IN Dehra the Brownes were within sight of the promised land, not always but often. Sometimes it lay quite hidden in some indefinable matted cloud-region of the sky, and then the last of the September rains came pelting down the Doon. Sometimes it thrust only a shoulder out of its cloud garments, and sometimes white fleeces swept over it from morning till night. But there were other days when the clouds sailed high above it, trailing their shadows after them, and then indeed the Brownes could climb to it by a winding road that began at their very feet. The road ascended to Mussoorie, which twinkled white on a spur above them seven thousand feet up, and twelve miles off. It would have been perfectly easy and practicable for them to go to Mussoorie; so easy and practicable that they didn’t go. When young Browne had looked after the planter’s tea-bushes, and put a headstone to his grave, and settled his bills and written home to his people the details of his affairs, there were eight days over. Mussoorie, the particular paradise of “quiet” people and retired old gentlemen who mean to die in the country, was an insignificant achievement for eight days. The Brownes surveyed the great brown flanks of the hills and burned for a wider conquest. They would go to Chakrata, high in the heart of the Himalayas to the west, half way to Simla. They would ride on horseback all the way up and down again to the railway station at Saharanpore; it would be more than a hundred miles—an expedition, as young Browne remarked, that they could dine out on for weeks when they got back to Calcutta. His own statement of their equipment for the journey is succinct. “We shall want,” said he, “two ponies, two syces, and an ekka. The ekka will take the luggage, bedding, Kasi, and the tiffin-basket. The ponies will take us, and the syces will come along behind. Let us go and hire them.”
They drove out the long shady main road of Dehra, creeping always upward to Rajpore, upon this business, and on the way Mr. Browne explained to Mrs. Browne the natural history, character and antecedents of the “bazar tat.” “They run small,” said young Browne, “mostly ears and tails. They have a tendency to displace objects to the rear of them, and a taste for human flesh. They were born and brought up in the bazar, and their morals are unspeakable. But you can’t get morals at any price in the bazar; they are too expensive to be sold there. And there’s no real harm in the bazar tat, if you only keep away from his heels and look a bit spry when you get on.”
Mrs. Browne asked, with concealed anxiety, if there were no donkeys. She was accustomed to a donkey, she said; she could ride one really rather well, and if George didn’t mind she would so much prefer it. But George answered in a spirit of ribaldry. The only donkeys in India, he said, belonged to the dhobies, and were permanently engaged in taking home the wash. By that time they had arrived. It was only a sharp elbow of a narrow mountain road, Rajpore, with its tumble-down houses, overhanging it on both sides, and it was quite empty. “There aren’t any horses here!” Helen remarked with disparagement.
“Wait,” returned her husband. Then, with really no particular emphasis, he said, “Gorah!”[[131]] to Rajpore.
[131]. Horse!
“Ha, hazur!”
“Good pony, sahib!”
“Here iz, memsahib—here iz!”