"Uh-huh. Yes. Go on."
"So she said we should come back here and find out if the sheikh will really take us and say to the sheikh (gasp) there is a lady in the city who can be of service to him in a certain matter and he should come back with us and we should lead him to the house and she will give us money and the sheikh will understand."
"Good!" pronounced Grim. "Not half bad. Just for that I'll go with you."
He winked at de Crespigny, nodded to me, pulled on a black-and-white striped Bedouin cloak, and went off with them at once. Whereat Narayan Singh came in, looking like another person altogether, although, if anything, bigger than before. He had got out of uniform and was dressed in a medley of Indian and Arab costume that made him look like one of those slaves in the "Arabian Nights" who cut off the heads of women. All he needed was a big curved simitar to fill the bill.
"Henceforth I am the hakim's servant," he said, showing his teeth in an enormous grin. "Only," he added, "since it will be I who instruct the hakim, in secret the sahib must listen to me."
He got out the medicine-chest, and being a Sikh with all of a soldier's opinion of civilians proposed to teach me what the labels on the little bottles stood for. Even he laughed after a minute or two, when he had got himself thoroughly sewed up and called each bottle by its wrong name.
"Ah! What does it matter!" he exclaimed at last. "Sore eyes—broken leg—boils—knife-wound—let it be all one. Give episin salts—always episin. Then, if we are long in one place, so that a sick man comes a second time, swearing grievously because of episin, give croton. That person will not come again, but the fame of the hakim will spread far and wide."
"You'd much better teach me how a hakim sits a camel,"
I suggested.
"All ways, sahib, for the hakim is not seldom a bunnia whose parents bought him education. Softer than wax is the rump of a bunnia and one who reads books. He sits this way until the boils break out, and then that way until the skin chafes. Then presently he lies across the saddle on his belly and either prays or curses, according as his spirit is pious or otherwise. But the camel continues to proceed, since that is its nature."
"Well, go on, instruct the hakim, then. The sahib listens."