Major Finnerty had made arrangements for a full day after Burra Moti. Coolies had been sent on with provisions in round wicker baskets slung from a bamboo yoke, and soon the three sahibs started.
Perhaps it was the absence of immediate haste, a lack of pressing action, that allowed their minds to rest on their surroundings. Really, though, it was Lord Victor who drew them to a recognition of their arboreal surroundings with: "I say! Look at that bonfire—but it's glorious!" his riding whip indicating a gold mohur tree that, clothed in its gorgeous spring mantle of vivid red bloom, suggested its native name of "Forest on Fire."
"Yes," Finnerty said, "it seems to add to the heat of the sun, and, as if that weren't enough, listen to that damn cuckoo, the 'brain-fever bird,' vocal in his knowledge that we'll soon be frying in Hades."
The bird of fiendish iteration squeaked: "Fee-e-e-ver, fee-e-e-ver, fee-e-e-ver!" till he came to a startled hush, as, with noisy cackle, a woodpecker, all golden beak and red crest atop his black-and-white waistcoat, shot from the delicate green foliage.
"It's a land of gorgeous colouring," Finnerty commented; "trees and birds alike."
"Minus the scent and song," Swinton added as a hornbill opened his yellow coffin beak to screech in jarring discord.
But just when they had passed the sweet-scented neem, and then a kautchnor standing like some giant artificial wooden thing decorated with creamy white-and pink-petaled lilies, Finnerty drew rein, holding up his hand, and to their ears floated from a tangle of babool the sweet song of a shama. It was like the limpid carolling of a nightingale in a hedge at home; it bred a hunger of England in Lord Victor's boy heart. When the song hushed, as they passed the babool Finnerty pointed to a little long-tailed bird with dull red stomach, and the youth, lifting his helmet, exclaimed, "You topping old bird! I'd back you against a lark."
Perhaps India, populous with bird and animal life as well as human, was always as much on parade as it seemed this morning, and that they now but observed closer. At any rate, as they left the richer-garbed foothills for the heavier sombreness of the forest, their eyes were caught by the antics of a black-plumaged bird who had seized the rudder of a magpie and was being towed along by that squawking, frightened mischief-maker.
With a chuckle, Finnerty explained: "He's a king crow, known to all as the 'police wallah,' for he's eternally putting others to rights. That 'pie' has been looting some nest, and the king crow is driving him over into the next county."
Like a gateway between the land of the living and the land of beyond, its giant white limbs weird as the arms of a devil-fish, reaching through glossy leaves to almost touch a wall of sal, stood a pipal, its wide-spreading roots, daubed with red paint, nursing a clay idol that sat amid pots of honey, and sweet cakes, and gaudy tinsel, and little streamers of coloured cloth—all tribute to the god of the sacred wild fig. Beyond this they were in a cool forest; above, high against a blue sky, the purple haze of the sal bloom, their advent sending a grey-backed fat little dweller scuttling away on his short legs.