The immediate foreground, as I said before, slopes sharply from my very feet, where a clump of wild sage and jasmin (the leaves just breaking) grows over a charming little bunch of sweet violets. Lower down I can see the lilac flowers of a self-heal, and the bottom of the little gorge is clothed with a bush like a hazel, only with large, soft whitish flowers.
My solitude has just been enlivened by the appearance of a cheerful party of lovely birds. They are very busy among the “hazels,” flying from bush to bush with restless activity, and wasting no time in idleness. They are about the size of large finches—slender in shape, with longish tails. They are divided into two perfectly distinct kinds, probably male and female. The former have the back, head, and wings black; the latter barred with scarlet, the breast and underparts also scarlet. The others—which I assume to be the females—replace the black with ashy olive, the wings being barred with yellow, the underparts yellowish. The very familiar note of the cuckoo, somewhere up in the jungle, reminds me of an English spring.
4 P.M.—I knew it! I knew that if the wind held down the nullah I should be dragged up that horrible ridge opposite. Hardly had I written the above when I was hunted from my lair, and rushed down 200 steep feet, and then up some 500 or 600 on the other side of the stream, through an abattis of clinging undergrowth that made a severe toil of what could never have been a pleasure. There can be no doubt but that a pith helmet—a really shady, broad one—is a most infernal machine under which to force one’s way through brushwood.
Well, all things come to an end—wind first, temper next, and finally the journey.
My shikari is a fiend in human shape. He slinks along on the flat at what looks like a mild three-miles-an-hour constitutional, but unless you are a real four-mile man you will be left hopelessly astern; but when he gets upon his favourite “one in one” slope, then does he simply sail away, with the tiffin coolie carrying a fat basket and all your spare lumber in his wake, while you toil upward and ever upwards—gasping—until with your last available breath you murmur “Asti,” and sink upon the nearest stone a limp, perspiring worm!
5.30 P.M.—That bear has taken a sleeping draught!
I am now perched on a lonely rock, my hard taskmaster having routed me out of a very comfortable place under a blue pine, whose discarded needles afforded me a really agreeable resting-place, and dragged me away down again through the pine forest and jungle; hurried me across a roaring torrent on a fallen tree trunk; personally conducted me hastily up a place like the roof of a house; and finally, explaining that the bear, when disturbed, must inevitably come close past me, has departed with his staff (the chota shikari, the tiffin coolie, and a baboon-faced native) to wake up the bear and send him along.
After the first flurry of feeling all alone in the world, with only a probable bear for society, and having loaded all my guns, clasped my visor on my head and my Bessemer hug-proof strait-waistcoat round my “tummy,” I felt calm enough to await events with equanimity.
6.15 P.M.—A large and solemn monkey is sitting on the top of a thick and squat yew tree regarding me with unfeigned interest. The torrent is roaring away in the cleft below. Nothing else seems alive, and I am becoming bored——What? A bear? No! The shikari, thank goodness!
“Well, shikari—Baloo dekho hai?” No, it is passing strange, but he has not seen a bear. “All right! Pick up the blunderbuss, and let us make tracks for the ship.”