"Of course, it's altogether right; I'd like to be with you."
"Then will you direct us?" Cadman asked.
"As an officer in a land-department, you understand—" Dickson answered slowly, "I'm not supposed to send men into a place like that, to their death. But I want you to know that my responsibility has nothing whatever to do with my concern. Because I value your lives as men—I want to be careful. You must let me think it out loud. It's a maze. I may place you, as I get on."
"We appreciate your care," Cadman said earnestly.
"The 'great' Grass Jungle is the proper name for vast territory—not all in one piece," Dickson Sahib began. "It comes in rifts between parallel rivers among the mountains. Seepage back and forth between the streams, gives the moisture necessary for such growth—year round.
"When white men come to the edge of one of those rifts, they turn back.
It's pestilential with wild beasts. Natives call it the Place-of-Fear.
White men don't challenge it—they go round. Government has named one
part of it—over toward the eastern end of the Vindhas—the Bund el
Khand, the closed country; that name tells its own story."
Dickson Sahib stopped, frowning.
"The native with silks to exchange goes down to Bombay?" he went on. "That means, not Calcutta-way. It also means, not anywhere in the Deccan—which clears us away from large tracts. Yet he usually calls it 'great'—that should mean, the Bund el Khand. No one knows how far in; but you'll best approach it from this side. I'm not dissuading you; I'd like to be along. I'm offering you choice of my assortment of firing-pieces. I'll work you out some running lines—they'll be ready by late-breakfast time. But I'm certain your best place to leave the tracks will be Sehora."
Dickson Sahib was worrying with a match, his face troubled, as he muttered:
"Now if Hand-of-a-God—"