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Title: Bengal Lancer
Author: Yeats-Brown, Francis Charles Claypon (1886-1944)
Date of first publication: July, 1930
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Victor Gollancz, September 1930
   [fifth impression]
Date first posted: 26 November 2010
Date last updated: 26 November 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #664

This ebook was produced by Al Haines




BENGAL LANCER


by

F. YEATS-BROWN




LONDON

VICTOR GOLLANCZ LTD

14 Henrietta Street Covent Garden

1930




NOTE

Some paragraphs of this book have been taken from contributions to _The
Spectator_ and _The Field_.  I am indebted to the Editors of these
publications for giving me leave to reprint what I wanted.

_F. Y.-B._

London, March 15, 1930.




  _First published July 1930
  Second impression July 1930
  Third impression August 1930
  Fourth impression August 1930
  Fifth impression September 1930_




_Printed in Great Britain by_

The Camelot Press Ltd., London and Southampton




CONTENTS


_Chapter_ I.  New Year's Eve, 1905
         II.  Durbar and a Dog Fight
        III.  Masheen of the Mirrored Thumbs
         IV.  The Delhi Road
          V.  The King Cobra and the Herald of the Star
         VI.  Polo
        VII.  Pigsticking
       VIII.  Men and Mud Turtles
         IX.  Benares
          X.  Death of The Devil
         XI.  Beauty and Boredom
        XII.  In the Air
       XIII.  The Long Descent of Wasted Days
        XIV.  Christmas, 1918
         XV.  The End of Sport and Soldiering
        XVI.  The Festival of the Fish-Eyed Goddess
       XVII.  Jaganath, Lord of the World
      XVIII.  The Temple of the Undistracted Mind




CHAPTER I

NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1905

All the long way from Bareilly to Khushalgar on the Indus (the first
stage of my journey to Bannu) I was alone in my railway carriage with
two couchant lions.

Brownstone and Daisy were their names.  Lord Brownstone, as he was
entered in the register of the Indian Kennel Club, was the son of
Jeffstone Monarch, and the grandson of Rodney Stone, the most famous
bull-dog that ever lived.  Brownstone was a light fawn dog, with black
muzzle: I had bought him in Calcutta.  His wife I had ordered from the
Army and Navy Stores in England: she was a brindle bitch by Stormy Hope
out of Nobby, with the stud name of Beckenham Kitty, but I called her
Daisy.  Both Brownstone and I were enchanted by her, for although
rather froglike to an uninitiated eye, she fulfilled every canon of her
breed's beauty.

When the train stopped, they stopped snoring.  If anyone ventured to
open the door, Daisy growled in a low, acid voice; and Brownstone
became a rampant instead of a couchant lion.  So I remained, with
leisure to reflect on this great, flat land we were traversing, and on
my probationary year in it, just passed.


I was nineteen and a half.  A year before I had become the trusty and
well-beloved servant of His Majesty King Edward VII.  Two months after
receiving my commission I had sailed for India.

On the morning of my arrival at Bareilly an obsequious individual had
waited on me with a bag of rupees.  If I wanted money, he said, he
would give me as much as I desired.

I wanted fourteen pounds at once, for an Afghan horse-dealer had
brought to my tent door a five-year-old bay country-bred mare--a
racy-looking Kathiawari, with black points, who cocked her curved ears
engagingly and had the makings of a good light-weight polo-pony.  I
bought her on the spot.

I had only to shout _Quai Hai_ to summon a slave, only to scrawl my
initials on a _chit_ in order to obtain a set of furniture, a felt
carpet from Kashmir, brass ornaments from Moradabad, silver for
pocket-money, a horse, champagne, cigars, anything I wanted.  It was a
jolly life, yet among these servants and _salaams_ I had sometimes a
sense of isolation, of being a caged white monkey in a Zoo whose
patrons were this incredibly numerous beige race.

Riding through the densely packed bazaars of Bareilly City on Judy, my
mare, passing village temples, cantering across the magical plains that
stretched away to the Himalayas, I shivered at the millions and
immensities and secrecies of India.  I liked to finish my day at the
club, in a world whose limits were known and where people answered my
beck.  An incandescent lamp coughed its light over shrivelled grass and
dusty shrubbery; in its circle of illumination exiled heads were bent
over English newspapers, their thoughts far away, but close to mine.
Outside, people prayed and plotted and mated and died on a scale
unimaginable and uncomfortable.  We English were a caste.  White
overlords or white monkeys--it was all the same.  The Brahmins made a
circle within which they cooked their food.  So did we.  We were a
caste: pariahs to them, princes in our own estimation.

It was pleasant enough to be a prince.  Two dozen valets, and
innumerable servants of other kinds had come, with testimonials wrapped
up in blue handkerchiefs, to seek employment from me.  The eagerness to
be my valet had struck me as strange, for I did not then know that
Indian servants like a young master, being human in his early years,
and worth the trouble of breaking into Indian ways.

So it had come that I engaged Jagwant, a magnificent and faithful
person, with elegant whiskers and an hereditary instinct for service.
During the fifteen years that he was my friend and servant, I only once
saw his equanimity disturbed; and that was not by any worldly
circumstance, but the powers of darkness.  He was a Kahar, the highest
caste of Hindu that will serve Europeans.

Jagwant was with me on board the train, in the servants' compartment
adjoining mine.  The remainder of my servants--a waiter, a washerman, a
water-carrier, and sweeper, and two strong men for Judy (one to groom
her and the other to give her grass)--I had paid off with a sense of
relief.  They had all smelt rather of snuff, and depressed me with
their poverty and humility.  Indeed, except for a _munshi_, who came
daily to teach me Urdu, and the lordly Jagwant, I could not at this
time feel any sympathy with the people of the country that was to be my
home.  I had expected and imagined much, but not this sad,
all-pervasive squalor.  Where were the colours and contrasts I had
found in books?  Where were the Rajahs who ruled in splendour and those
other Rajahs who drank potions of powdered pearls and woman's milk?
Where the priests and nautch-girls, and idols whose bellies held rubies
as big as pigeons' eggs?  All I had seen was a tired people, mostly
squatting on its heels and crouching over fires of cow-dung.

That, and my British regiment, was the India I knew.  In the regiment,
I had learned how to drill a company of riflemen, and to see that their
boots and bedding and brushes were disposed in the manner approved by
the Army Council, and that their hair was properly cut, and that they
washed their feet.  Also I had learned to hit a backhander under Judy's
tail.

I had been rich during this last year (on the _chit_ system) and had
enjoyed myself enormously.  My last act had been to sell Judy for
double the price I had given for her, in order to settle my debts.

Now I was on my way north, to join the 17th Cavalry at Bannu, on the
North-West Frontier.


The further we travelled, the larger and livelier the men looked.
Women and children remained enigmatic bundles, small and inert.

Those doll-like babies with flies round their eyes--nineteen thousand
of them were born every day in India.  A staggering thought, all this
begetting and birth....  And that girl with the very big brown eyes
looking at me as if she was a deer, and I a hunting leopard, what was
she thinking about?  The bangles that glowed against her sunny skin?
Her gods?  Food?  Why did some girls have a diamond in the left nostril?

Which of these people were Brahmins?  Which Muhammedans?  Which
Animists?  There were fourteen million Brahmins in India, I had read in
a book, but to me the twice-born and the eaters of offal were alike.
Did this slow brown tide that passed my carriage windows fight and make
love like the quicker white?  Did it possess parts and passions like
myself?  Perhaps I should find out, as a Bengal Lancer.


At Khushalgar, Jagwant and Brownstone and Daisy and I crossed the Indus
and took another train to Kohat; and at Kohat, which we reached in the
late afternoon, we packed ourselves into a tonga which already held an
officer bound for Bannu, and his luggage.

Every moment of that eighty-mile drive had its thrill for me, but for
my veteran companion the journey meant boredom and discomfort.  He
slept between the stages, waking up only when we changed ponies, in
order to swear and drink sloe-gin.

Our ponies, galled at girth and neck, either jibbed backwards to within
an inch of a precipice, or reared up like squealing unicorns and dashed
downhill for a yard or two, then sat suddenly on their haunches, hoping
perhaps that the harness would break and the tonga roll over them and
end their wretched lives.  Never once would they pull into their traces
without some attempt at suicide.  When suicide had been averted a rope
was reeved under their fetlocks; a groom pulled on the two ends,
another pushed the tonga from behind, and the driver applied his whip
scientifically to the ponies' ears.  Cajoled and goaded, they would
jump into their painful collars at last, and gallop on to the next halt.

On the road we passed men like Israelitish patriarchs, and tall, grim
women in black, and a gang of Afridis who were dining on thick slices
of unleavened bread and pieces of fat mutton.  Stout fellows, these.
The firelight glinted in their hard eyes.

Once we slackened our pace while a boy ran beside us chattering about a
tribal quarrel up the road.  To help his cause, our driver agreed to
carry twenty rounds of ammunition to the next stage: there we were
waylaid by the opposing faction, who begged us to carry a hundred
rounds for their party.  My companion woke up at this moment and damned
them all roundly, but agreed to take twenty rounds, this once, for he
explained that we couldn't take sides.

At Lachi we encountered a band of beautiful young men with roses behind
their ears.  Where in all this waste, I asked myself, did flowers
bloom?  As far as the forlorn hills of the horizon I could see nothing
but rocks and pebbles.

On and on we rattled and crashed, until we came to the sugar-cane crops
of the Bannu suburbs, with a mist over them, solemn and mysterious.

My companion loaded his revolver; for there was a Garrison Order that
we were always to be armed near cantonments, he told us.  A fanatic had
recently murdered our Brigade Major.

At the city walls stood a sentry with fixed bayonet.  He opened a
barbed wire gate for us, and we drove on to the house where my regiment
and two battalions of the Frontier Force Infantry messed together.  My
companion descended here.  I reported myself to the Adjutant of the
17th Cavalry and was shown to my quarters.


At dinner that night I sat between the Adjutant and an elderly Infantry
Major.  The latter breathed fumes of alcohol through his false teeth,
like some fabulous dragon.

"Thank God I've finished with the frontier," he lisped.  "Thirty years
I've had of it.  Now they've failed me for command.  I'm retiring and
be damned to them.  There'th nothing but thtones and thniperth here.
Up in Miramthhah the other day, a young Political Offither was thtabbed
in his thleep by a Mathud recruit--thaid he'd noticed the thahib thlept
with hith feet towards Mecca and that he couldn't allow thuch an
inthult to hith religion.  But they did a thing to the bathtard he
didn't like.  After he wath hung, they thewed him up in pigthkin tho
that the _hourith_ won't look at him in Paradithe.  He'll have to
anthwer the trumpet of the Archangel wrapped in the thkin of a thwine!"

The port and madeira described constant ellipses over the long mess
table, and the elderly Major helped himself at each round.

I questioned the Adjutant about _ghazis_.  He told me that a certain
Mullah of the Powindahs was preaching to the tribesmen from the fateful
5th verse of the 9th chapter of the Koran: "And when the sacred months
are past, kill those who join other gods with God wherever ye shall
find them; and seize them and slay them and lay in wait for them with
every kind of ambush."  The murder of the Brigade Major had been a bad
business.  The ghazi hid in some crops at the roadside, waiting for the
General, presumably, who was leading a new battalion into cantonments.
The General had dropped behind for a moment, so the Brigade Major, who
was riding at the head of the troops, received the load of buckshot
intended for his chief.  It hit him in the kidneys and killed him
instantly.  The _ghazi_ tried to bolt, but was brought down wounded in
the crops by a Sikh sergeant.

"Did they sew him up in pigskin?" I enquired.

"Of course not," said the Adjutant.  "That's a yarn.  But we ought to
do something about these murders.  We're having a practice mobilisation
the day after to-morrow, and may go out after raiders any day.  There's
a fair chance of seeing active service here, and decent shooting.
Especially the snipe-jheels.  The polo isn't up to much, but we mean to
go in for the Indian Cavalry next year."


In the ante-room, the evening began to assume a festive mood.  We
dragged out a piano to the centre of the room.  Well-trained servants
appeared as if by magic to remove all breakable furniture (especially
some tall china jars which had been taken by one of the regiments at
the loot of Pekin) replacing it with a special set of chairs and tables
made to smash.  Senior officers bolted away to play bridge; the rest of
us, who were young in years, or heart, began to enjoy ourselves
according to ancient custom.

Somebody found an enormous roll of webbing and swaddled up a fat gunner
subaltern in it.  A lamp fell with a crash.  Wrestling matches began.
A boy in the Punjaub Frontier Force brought in a little bazaar-pony and
made it jump sofas.  He had his trousers torn off.

I stood on my head in order to prove that it was possible to absorb
liquid in that position.  When this seemed tame, I dived over sofas and
danced a jig with the elderly Major.  Then a dozen of us went off to
the billiard-room, where we played fives.

At midnight the fifty of us gathered in the ante-room again and sang
"Auld Lang Syne," for it was New Year's Eve.

Hours afterwards, I left the dust and din and walked back under the
stars to the bungalow in which I had been allotted a room.  I was
extraordinarily well pleased with myself and my new surroundings.
Everyone in my regiment was the best fellow in the world--and that
first impression of mine has not been altered by twenty years of
intimacy.

As I sank to sleep, exhausted, I remembered that my feet were pointing
westward, in the general direction of the Holy Ka'aba at Mecca, like
those of the Political Officer in the Major's story, but I was too
tired to move.


The New Year had begun very well indeed.




CHAPTER II

DURBAR AND A DOG FIGHT

Next morning the Adjutant took me to see the Commanding Officer.  I was
in uniform, belted and sworded and spurred, as I should have been had I
been attending Orderly Room in a British regiment.  The Colonel wore a
brown sweater.  His head was bent over a ledger, so that he did not see
me salute.  The Adjutant coughed.  The Colonel looked up, then down to
my toes, then up again.

My mind was a blank.  He asked me if I was comfortable and I answered
that I was extremely comfortable.  There was a solemn pause during
which all sorts of ridiculous things came into my mind, but I kept
silence.  Finally the Colonel said: "Well, don't let me detain you."

I withdrew in amazement and hesitated on the verandah, wondering what
to do next, for the Adjutant had remained behind.  There was a
fierce-looking little Indian with a bright red beard sitting on the
verandah smoking a cigarette.  He looked me up and down, as the Colonel
had done; then jumped up and saluted, saying "Salaam, Sahib" in a
high-pitched bark, and sat down again.  He was in a uniform of sorts,
wearing an old khaki jacket with the three stars of a Captain on the
shoulder, but his legs were encased in Jodphur breeches and his feet in
black slippers.  I couldn't make him out at all.  He kicked the
slippers off, threw away the cigarette, and went into the Colonel's
room without knocking.

"Who is the little red-bearded Captain?" I asked the Adjutant, who came
out as this curious figure went in.

"That's Rissaldar Hamzullah Khan," he answered.  "He's one of your
troop commanders.  You're posted to 'B' Squadron--all Pathans.  As the
Squadron Commander is away, Hamzullah will show you the ropes.  He's a
funny old chap; rose from the ranks.  Come along with me now, and I'll
introduce you to the other Indian officers."

We walked over to a tumble-down mud-hut, which was the Adjutant's
office.

A group of big, bearded men sat there on a bench.  They wore voluminous
white robes and held walking-sticks between their knees.  Another
group, without walking-sticks, squatted.  The squatters were called to
attention by the senior N.C.O.  The sitters rose, saluted the Adjutant
and looked at me sternly.  I was introduced and shook hands with
Rissaldar Major Mahomed Amin Khan, Jamadar Hazrat Gul, Rissaldar Sultan
Khan, Rissaldar Shams-ud-din and Woordie Major Rukan Din Khan--names
that made my head reel.  They all said "Salaam, Hazoor" (to which I
answered "Salaam, Sahib") except one Indian Officer, who disconcerted
me by saying "Janab 'Ali," which I afterwards discovered meant "Exalted
Threshold of Serenity," or more literally, "High Doorstep."

In the course of these introductions, Hamzullah arrived.  We shook
hands.  He eyed me narrowly, cackled with laughter and made a remark to
the Adjutant in Pushtu--the language of the frontier.

The Adjutant translated:

"He wants to know if you can ride.  He says you are the right build.
And he says you are a _pei-makhe halak_--a milk-faced boy."

I felt anything but pleased.

"Hamzullah will take you round the squadron," said the Adjutant.
"After stables, there's Durbar."

"If you will excuse me, Hazoor," said this surprising little man, as we
walked towards "B" Squadron, "I will inspect the Quarter Guard, since I
am Orderly Officer and it is on our way.  Then we'll choose your
chargers."

"I know exactly what I want as regards my horses, Rissaldar Sahib."

"Good.  I will see that you get what you want."

Will you? I thought.

As we approached the guard, the sentry cried "Fall in!" in the queerest
squeak.  I lingered in the offing, to see how things were done in
Indian Cavalry.

Five men and a sergeant sprang up from rope bedsteads and stood to
arms.  "Carrylanceadvance--visitingrounds" in one mouthful.

Hamzullah threw away his cigarette and stumped round, muttering
comments in guttural Pushtu, which sounded like curses--and were.

When the guard was dismissed one of the men turned left instead of
right.  To my surprise, the sergeant took a stride towards him and
struck him in the face.  He was a huge yokel with long black hair
heavily buttered.  His turban fell off and unwound itself in the dust.
Not a word was said.  The man picked it up and joined his comrades.  I
stood rooted to the spot, expecting Hamzullah to place the sergeant
under arrest.

He grunted and lit a cigarette.  Perhaps, I thought, he had not seen.

Years later, when I became Adjutant, I learned what should be visible
and what invisible in India _sillidar_ cavalry.  But until I had come
to understand this, I was continually being surprised and sometimes
shocked; therefore a small digression will be necessary if the reader
is to see the Bengal Lancers as they were organised in those far-away
years before the Great War.


Before the Mutiny, the yeomen and freebooters who served John Company
brought their own horse and their own equipment to the regiment in
which they elected to serve.  They came ready to fight.  They fought as
long as there was loot to be had, and then returned to tend their crops.

Later, owing to the difficulty of maintaining a standard in equipment
and horseflesh, it was found more convenient for the recruit to bring a
sum in cash instead of a horse and saddle, but the principle remained
the same, namely that the apprentice brought the tools of his trade.

In my day the cost of a _sillidar_ cavalryman's complete equipment was
about 55.  If the recruit could not bring the whole amount, he brought
at least 10, and owed the balance to the regiment, repaying the loan
month by month out of his pay.

Each _sillidar_ regiment (there were thirty, I think) maintained a
_Chanda_, or Loan Fund, out of which these advances were made.  As the
administrator of this fund, the Commandant of an Indian Cavalry
Regiment was to all intents and purposes the Managing Director of a
company in which each man held from 10 to 55 of debenture stock, the
debentures being secured on horses and equipment.  The Colonel might
also be considered as a contractor, who had engaged himself to supply
the Indian Government with 625 cavalry-men, fed, mounted, provisioned,
equipped (except for rifles and ammunition which were supplied by
Government) at the cost of 2 per month per man, including all the
transport and followers of the regiment--some 350 servants, 300 mules
and nine camels.

The pay of the men was about 30 rupees a month--say 2--rising by small
increases to 20 a month for the highest Indian rank, that of Rissaldar
Major.  At a very small cost, therefore, India was served by a body of
yeomen complete with horses, tents, servants, mules, camels--an
admirable bargain for Government, and a good one for its servants, for
the _sillidar_ cavalrymen was at once freer and more responsible than
any other soldier in the Empire.  He was freer, because men serving for
the pittance they received after repayment of their loans had to be
treated like the gentlemen adventurers that they were; and more
responsible because if a horse died or any loss to property occurred
through negligence, the owner had to pay for it.

The regiment looked on itself as a family business.  We bred horses as
well as bought them.  We all took an interest in our gear.  The Colonel
would no more have ordered a fresh consignment of saddlery without
discussing the matter with his Indian Officers than a manager would
install a new plant in his factory without consulting his directors.
All this made for friendliness, and broad views.  We had not time to
make our men into machines.  They remained yeomen who had enlisted for
_izzat_--the untranslatable prestige of India.

That such a state of affairs should be abhorent to the mind of the War
Office is readily understandable.  The _sillidar_ cavalry was abolished
immediately after the Great War on the plea that its mobilisation was
complicated and unsatisfactory under such individualistic arrangements.
So now our families are broken and scattered, and only a few ancestral
voices, such as mine, remain to prophesy the woe that must attend their
passing.  But India rarely changes, and rarely forgets.  When we give
up trying to teach our grandmother to suck the eggs of Western
militarism, she will again raise her levies in the way that suits her
best.


To return to "B" Squadron.  The Colonel came towards us, attended by
the numerous staff that follows in the wake of every oriental autocrat.
My Squadron Commander was away.  What should I do?

Hamzullah's foxy eyes perceived my embarrassment.  He whispered: "Blow
your whistle, Sahib."

"I haven't got one."

"I'll blow mine."

The great man was upon us: Hamzullah blew a piercing blast.

"Go on with your work," said the Colonel, carrying a silver-headed
malacca cane towards his helmet in answer to our salute.  He wore
civilian clothes.

What now?  I turned again to Hamzullah, who barked, "_Hathe de lande_"
which is Pushtu for "Hands underneath."

The men, who had been standing at attention with elbows squared in
front of their surprised horses, now resumed their brushing of bellies.
The squadron kicked and squealed.

Stopping in front of a chestnut mare, the Colonel pointed at her
fetlocks, which were hairy.  Her owner dropped his brush, and rubbed
them furiously, and the mare let fly with both heels, kicking over a
bucket of dirty water.

"These devils never do what they're told," growled the Colonel.  "Legs
should have been done by now.  Ask Hamzullah to tell you the Order of
Grooming after I've gone.  He won't see that it's carried out, but
he'll tell you."

The procession continued, the Colonel leading, a dozen of us behind,
hanging on his words.

"Tail wants pulling," he said to Hamzullah.

"Hazoor," said Hamzullah.

"A dirty horse is never fat."

"Hazoor," said Hamzullah.

"Staring coat.  You must get rid of that boy if he can't keep his horse
better.  Fat enough before, under Khushal Khan."

"I shall warn him, Hazoor.  He's a _zenana_-fed brat!"

"File his teeth," said the Colonel.

I started, but saw he was alluding to a raw-hipped waler.

"If that brute doesn't get fatter, put him down for casting."

"Yes, sir," said the Adjutant.

"When did I buy that mare?"

The Woordie Major produced an immense book, carried behind him by an
orderly, and opened it at the proper place.

"Lyallpur Fair, 1903," mused the Colonel.  "She's turning out well.  I
think we'll get a foal out of her.  Send her to the Farm."

"Very good, sir," said the Adjutant, making a note of her number.

"And, by the way, give this young gentleman a copy of Standing Orders
and Farm Orders."

"Another tail wants pulling," said the Colonel.  "Do you know how to
pull tails, Yeats-Brown?"

"Yes, sir."

"You had better get Hamzullah to show you how we do it here.  Are the
men for Persia chosen?"

"The----?"

"Yes, Hazoor.  I have chosen them," says Hamzullah.

"Bring them at Durbar with their horses.  A great many tails want
pulling."

When the Colonel came to the end of "B" Squadron I drew breath again.
A blessed calm descended on us.  Over in "C" Squadron the whistle
sounded, and then the cry of "_Malish_."  Here we no longer bothered
about grooming.  The men stroked and patted their horses' backs, or
leant against them for support.  The East had returned to its old ways.

"Tell me, Rissaldar Sahib, about the Order of Grooming."

"Hazoor, it is in a book," answered Hamzullah in his high-pitched
voice.  "Five minutes for the horses' backs, ten for their blessed
bellies, five for their foolish faces, and five for their dirty docks.
A time to brush, and a time to rub, and a time to put everything in its
place.  That is good.  But I am an old man, and cannot remember new
ways.  If I see a dirty horse in my troop, I beat its owner.  If it is
again dirty, I whip him with my tongue.  And if that has no effect, he
goes.  Look at the result."

The result was that a hundred satiny coats shone in the sun.

"But some of the tails want pulling," I said.

"I have known the Colonel Sahib for thirty years," said Hamzullah, "and
never yet have the tails of any troop been right.  Not since we
enlisted the first men and bought the first horses."

"Were you here when the regiment was raised?"

"Yes, Hazoor.  I was a syce then, for I was too small and ugly to be a
soldier.  The Colonel Sahib was Adjutant.  After five years he enlisted
me as a fighting man.  Before I die I shall be Rissaldar Major."

My heart warmed to him.

"I have much to learn, Rissaldar Sahib," I said.  "I hope you will
teach me."

"Men and horses are simple," he answered, "but mules are spawn of
Satan.  We can't get the syces for them nowadays.  Wages are
ridiculous.  The young men all want to go to school.  What do they
learn there?  Softness!  Huh!"

We continued to stroll round the squadron, taking not the slightest
notice of the men, some of whom were at work, while others kept dodging
into their huts, where cooking was in progress.  At last a trumpet call
announced "Water and Feed," and after that "Durbar."


All India loves Durbars.  They are her Parliaments, based on her
ancient village system of a headman advised by a _panchayet_--five
elders--and she may again rule herself by them.

An armchair is set for the Colonel, with a low table before it.  By his
side are stools for the Adjutant, Second-in-Command, the Rissaldar
Major (senior Indian officer) and Woordie Major (Indian Adjutant).  At
right-angles to these high personages are two benches, on which the
remaining British and Indian Officers sit in any order, intermingled.
At the fourth side of the square, opposite the Commandant's table, are
marshalled the persons to come before him.

All round, but particularly facing the Commandant, the men of the
regiment are sitting or standing; spectators to our way of thinking,
but something more in their own estimation, for they are there to see
that justice is done.  That they do not execute it themselves is
immaterial; Durbar is a testing time for the Commandant.  If he has not
the wit and personality to rule, his deficiencies are soon apparent.

The Indian Officers rise, in turn, to present their recruits.

"A" and "B" Squadrons are bird-faced, white-skinned, keen-eyed boys,
wild as hawks.  They come from Independent Territory, and have called
no man master.  The Colonel looks them up and down, as he did me, and
asks their parentage.  Whether he accepts or rejects a candidate, his
cold politeness remains unchanged: "He needn't wait," he says, or "Send
him to the doctor," or "I don't think we've room," or "As he's a
relation of yours, we'll give him a trial."

"C" and "D" Squadron recruits are Punjaub Muhammedans, slow and strong
as the oxen they drive at the plough.  They are darker than the
Pathans, and have the manners of shrewd peasants, self-confident and a
little suspicious.  Then come the men for Persia (medalled veterans
going to Teheran to serve as the Legation Guard) and the leave men.  No
soldiers in the world have so many holidays as Bengal Lancers.  An
Afridi wants to settle a blood feud.  His uncle has been shot while
gathering crops among his womenfolk.  He must go at once to attend to
the affair, or his face will be blackened in the village.

Then the defaulters.  One of my men has allowed his horse to become
rope-galled.  A small offence apparently, but Hamzullah does not bring
men before the Colonel unless he wants them severely dealt with.

"Fined fifteen rupees.  You'll go, if you give us any more trouble,"
says the Colonel.

"Hazoor, I have a wife and three small children to support."

And indeed twenty shillings fine, to my thinking, comes heavy on a man
whose pay is about five shillings a month after deductions.

"Your children are cared for by your brother," says the Colonel (who
knows everything).  "Get you gone."

Finally we come to the animals, who number a thousand and whose affairs
are complex.  Should the horses be fed on gram and barley, or gram
alone?  Should we buy ten truckloads of oats, or only one?  Do the
mules require an extra blanket on these winter nights?  Engrossing
questions these, and the Rissaldar Major and Hamzullah Khan and the
Adjutant have much to say concerning them, for there is a nice
distinction between discipline and administration in Durbar.  Justice
is a matter for one mind, economy for many.

Meanwhile, the junior British officer present at these proceedings sits
twiddling his thumbs with boredom.  He does not know that before the
British came every ruler in India transacted business thus _coram
publico_, and that to-day's meeting under the banyan tree is a
continuance of that tradition.  He does not know (or care) if our civil
administration is becoming intolerably dull, and our justice dilatory.
He does not know that Indians are becoming puzzled by our methods, and
that the races of the North have buried a hundred thousand lethal
weapons under their hearths in a determination never to be ruled by
_babus_, brown or white.

Quotations from the Koran are being advanced in support of--what?  The
fit of a lance bucket?  The quality of a picketing rope?  Or is it
something to do with the pay of syces?

Brownstone and Daisy have trotted up to see what their master is doing.
They have no business here, but Brownstone, bolder than his mate,
wriggles up to me, looking round the corner of his body and arching his
back.  He wants to be slapped on the loins.  No Brownstone, this is a
Durbar.

Daisy, looking very batrachian, is gazing up at me from a safe
distance, her wizened muzzle cocked enquiringly.  A chow, a terrier,
and a friendly mongrel have also arrived, encouraged by some of the
younger officers, who know that a dog fight has its uses.

"Take those brutes away," says the Colonel.

It is too late.

Chows are quarrelsome; this one growls and lifts his leg.  Brownstone
pounces without an ultimatum.  The chow flicks round with a yelp and
bites him on the ear.  Brownstone's teeth close on his adversary's
haunch; he had meant to strangle him, but missed.  The mongrel dashes
in to be at the death.  In his eagerness, he collides with the terrier
and they roll over and over together, snarling and snapping and
writhing under the Colonel's table.

Daisy is skirmishing on the outskirts of the battle, I think, but it is
difficult to see clearly in the cloud of dust and dog.  The chow howls
like a lost soul, and Brownstone, whom I have caught by the hind legs,
looks at me with a red, pleased eye as if to say "I know you'll give me
hell, but let me kill him first!"

The terrier is worrying my trousers, and Daisy has attacked a
peculiarly tender part of the chow.  I lift and pull and curse.  For an
instant Brownstone slackens his grip, but only to get a better hold,
nearer the throat.

Someone has produced a pepper-pot.  It is ground over Brownstone's
nose, making him sigh.  He won't stop killing for that.  The Drill
Major swathes the chow's head in a duster, to prevent him biting, and
pulls one way while I pull the other.

"A bucket of water!"

It is sluiced over them; we jerk, and jerk again.  At last they come
apart.

Daisy is kicked into a corner, hysterical with excitement.  The mongrel
runs away, and the chow stays put, licking his wounds gently.
Brownstone is semi-conscious, but happy ... I take him by the scruff of
the neck and shake him; a whip would be useless at such a moment.


So I have shoved my oar into the Durbar after all!  Is this the end of
my career?

Luckily, no irreparable damage has been done.  Durbar was almost over.
I follow the Colonel, who is walking back to his bungalow, attended by
the Rissaldar Major, Woordie Major, Drill Major, Adjutant.

"Do you want me at the court-martial this afternoon, sir?"

"No, you damned young fool.  Why did you let that hell-hound off a
lead?  Better take him to the horse-hospital."

"Very good, sir."

"By the way, have you chosen your chargers and orderly?  If not, then
ask Hamzullah about them.  You play polo, don't you?  There's a boy
called Khushal in 'B' Squadron.  I taught his father to ride, and he's
a light weight who might do you well."




CHAPTER III

MASHEEN OF THE MIRRORED THUMBS

In the ivory box where my reels of memory are stored I can find only
disjunct strips of film relating to my time at Bannu, for the heat has
melted and distorted the sequence.

There is the night when the elderly Major shot himself by mistake;
there is the fascinating city of Peshawar, where I spent some months
learning Pushtu; there is the green polo ground at Bannu, and the
rocky, desolate uplands where we learned our business of soldiering;
there is the daily round and its contrasting inner life.  But there are
only short strips of each, and a monotony of flapping _punkah_.


Khushal Khan, the orderly recommended by the Colonel, was a ringleted
youth, with silky-curled moustache and manners as finished as his seat
on a horse.  He brought with him from the regimental store my equipment
as a Bengal Lancer--a blue and gold full dress, with chain mail
epaulettes; a khaki coat of the same cut; a blue and gold turban, and a
khaki one; a pair of large leather gauntlets, and two resplendent
_cummerbunds_.

To tie a _cummerbund_, one end is held at full stretch by an assistant,
while the wearer clasps the other on his hip and rolls himself into it.
The _cummerbund_ is six yards long, so it is impossible to practise
such convolutions in a bungalow room.  In my enthusiasm, I went out
hatless into the courtyard with Khushal and during the few minutes that
I stood there bareheaded, the sun worked my undoing.

Twenty-four hours later I could not longer have been called a
milk-faced boy, for my complexion had become the tint of weak tea.  I
had sunstroke.

My brain buzzed with anxieties and urgencies that I could not allay.  A
frontier war was imminent, it seemed to me, and I must be ready for it,
yet I could not collect my gear, for everything was in the wrong place,
and my head too full to remember where anything might be.

The doctor came and prescribed bed and barley water.  In two days I was
up again, completely recovered.  But in that short time I had learned
that the sun is more than the giver of life.  In England, Nature seems
a tender mother, but East of Suez she changes her sex and she becomes
Siva, Lord of Change and Destroyer of Names and Forms--Destroyer, that
is, of ignorance.

The thermometer began to mount suddenly in March.  For a time I enjoyed
the heat, but as the relentless days wore on, life became a struggle
with prickly-heat, brain-fever birds, sunstroke, dust, malaria.

We paraded for musketry at five o'clock in the morning and returned at
nine, when a haze danced over the targets, and rifle barrels grew too
hot to hold.  Jagwant pulled me out of my boots; I untied a necktie
which had become a wet knot; dressed in civilian clothes which soon
hung pulpily; breakfasted on glass after glass of milk and soda and
ice-mango fool, until my body was swollen but my thirst not slaked.
Afterwards I went to stables, attended office or Durbar, returned to my
bungalow where various complicated accounts had to be written up and
signed (for the _sillidar_ system was already beginning to be smothered
in red tape) and bicycled back to lunch in an air so hot that it caused
men to muffle their mouths.  In the afternoon, I attempted to read or
answer letters or learn Hindustani, in a mist of sleep.  At four
o'clock I stirred up my senses with tea, put on long boots again, and
rode down to polo.

For polo, Brownstone left his almost permanent place under the _punkah_
and trotted out with his master.  Daisy was going to have puppies and
led a secluded life, but for Brownstone and me this was the best part
of the day.

True, I leashed him directly we reached the ground, lest he should
indulge in his own forms of sport, but he found all kinds of amusing
smells there and I believe he enjoyed the games.  His master was
fighting and he would have liked to help.  Once he tried to do so, by
flying at the white throat of Milkmaid, my best pony but one, but he
received a straight left from her forefoot which put him out of harm's
way.  After that, Khushal watched him.

My ponies were Crediton, a grand old chestnut who taught me tournament
polo, and a glorious black Arab, who died of snake-bite on the muzzle
before he was fully trained; Milkmaid, and my two chargers, Antinous
and Ur of the Chaldees.  These two carried me for three chukkers each,
for, being bigger, I thought that they should do more work.

I made these good beasts sweat and suffer unnecessarily for my
shortcomings, cutting their mouths and banging their fetlocks, but I
fed them well and saw that they were decently groomed.  If there be a
heaven for horses, may they find peaceful paddocks there, and springier
turf than that of Bannu.

After dinner, eaten still under the swish of fans, I went back to
another _punkah_, by my bed and books.


My life was as sexless as any monk's at this time; and in a sense I was
only half alive, lacking the companionship of women.  But what is good
for the Roman priest is good (I suppose) for the Indian Cavalry
subaltern, who has work to do (like the priest) which he could scarcely
perform if hampered by family ties.  Certainly I possessed perceptions
then which are uncapturable now in middle age.  I was full of
intuitions and enthusiasms, for when one sense is thwarted others are
sometimes freed and quickened, although at what cost to the mind's
rhythms I do not know.  I do not know how far discipline of the sex
life is a good thing.  But I know that a normal sex life is more
necessary in a hot than a cold country.  The hysteria which seems to
hang in the air of India is aggravated by severe continence of any
kind; at the end of Ramzan, for instance, my fasting squadron used to
become as lively as a basket of rattlesnakes.  Many good brains in
India have been bound like the feet of a mandarin's wife, so that they
can only hobble ever after; and such cramping of the imagination may
lose us the Empire.

Many times have I said that I would write these things.  But now that I
have done so, in this grey London weather, I cannot believe that I am
not exaggerating.  I cannot believe that it was too hot to bear a sheet
on my skin, that I ingested six glasses of milk and soda for breakfast,
had a malaria temperature twice a week for months on end, that my brain
grew addled, and my liver enlarged, and my temper liable to rise like
the fires of Stromboli.  Yet so it was.  Men's brains and bodies, like
other machines, work differently at different temperatures; and India
would be a happier country if we could always remember that, especially
in Whitehall.

One night, when the temperature had risen apoplectically (for a ceiling
of thunderclouds had closed in on us) and I lay gasping on the roof of
my quarters, a revolver shot rang out from a neighbouring bungalow.  A
moment before I had been drinking tepid soda water, and thinking of
England, and cursing this stifling night through which the angel of
sleep would not come.  But now Providence had sent something
better--raiders?

Voices cried "_Halaka ghula di_!" ("'Ware thief!").  Khushal arrived
with the first weapon to his hand, a lance.

I went out in my pyjamas to explore.  Crossing the road in the
direction of the shot, I found myself with a group of officers in the
elderly Major's bungalow, where a curious story was related to me.

The elderly Major had been celebrating his approaching departure with
more than enough champagne.  On reaching his bed he had lain down
quietly; in a stupor, no doubt.  Then his shattered nerves began to
conjure up visions, and by the glimmer of the night-light which he
always kept burning beside him, he saw a skinny outline at the foot of
the bed.  When he moved, it moved.  Seizing a revolver in his trembling
hand, he fired; then he roared with pain, for he had shot not a face,
but his own foot.

Next morning, he was hurried down to Kohat, with an orderly to put ice
on his mangled toes and on his poor, deluded head.  So he passed from
our sight--flotsam of the tide of Empire--and although this incident
has been told before, I repeat it, since it really did happen to my
elderly Major.


During this summer, cholera broke out in Bannu, of the sudden kind,
that arches the victim backwards and kills people in a few hours.  I do
not know how many of the heathen it took in the bazaar, but it chose a
dear old missionary lady from among the godly and the godless in
cantonments.  I was one of the officers deputed to carry her coffin to
the little churchyard where lie the men of the Rifle Brigade who fell
at Misar.

A British staff-sergeant was in charge of the proceedings.  He was a
stickler for formalities and he stopped our forlorn procession because
we were carrying the departed head foremost.  At the graveside he
barked out the responses and twirled his waxed moustache so
aggravatingly that I wished that the earth would swallow him.

I strolled back to the mess in an over-wrought mood, drank a quart of
beer, fell asleep on a sofa.  When I awoke, I looked differently on
this earth.

The limit of life was darkness.  God Himself was in the dark, else He
could not have been so wicked as to create so much unwelcome death and
unsatisfied desire.  If God was good, why all this complicated
begetting and hideous death in order to sustain a world which must in
any case shrink and shrivel into nothingness?  If God was kind, why
this cholera?

I had been living in a smug mental sanctuary where unpleasantness was
veiled in aphorisms.  We all lived like that in England, where the
seasons are beautiful.  Here in High Asia we were closer to realities.

There was no God.  I read Renan, and Anatole France's _Le Procurateur
de Jude_, and a tract called _Roger's Reasons_, wherein Roger proves
to his satisfaction that Noah took all the animals into the Ark.  Then
I sent for some missionary pamphlets which described various aspects of
the religion of the Hindus, contrasting it with our own superior faith.
Krishna had stolen the clothes of some milkmaids.  Christ never did
that.  Kali was a goddess with a necklace of human skulls, dripping
with blood.  She danced on the body of her husband.  Most improper.  I
was shocked, not by Hinduism, but by our missionaries who forgot the
peccadilloes of Noah and the other patriarchs when comparing our sacred
books with those of India.

Their unfairness inclined me towards Theosophy, and through Mrs. Besant
I came to read about the System of the Vedanta.  I find a faded
note-book in which the following comments are entered, under the
influence of an emotion that I cannot exactly recall:

"In the quiet hour of dawn, when the brain seems to be separate from
the body and loth to return to the routine of dressing and the daily
round, there comes to me a desire to rearrange my thoughts.  I have a
very miscellaneous lot of ideas.  A good deal of rubbish has been
acquired carelessly, and has stuck in my mind without any particular
purpose.  The treasures I have were gained in the moonlight, or seeing
some hill-top struck by dawn.  Always alone.

"Long before my teens I looked on clergymen as people endowed with more
faith and hope than charity.  I still hold to this.  _Roger's Reasons_
is a terrible book.  There is no one so godless as a self-satisfied
clergyman, for no one contradicts him."  (I omit some lengthy
immaturities here.)

"I have never doubted that I had a soul.  But it is Mrs. Besant who has
shown me the possibility of making this soul my own, and bringing it
into my daily life and my eventual death.  I have not been thinking
about my soul much, but every time I look at her ideas, they seem to
have grown more clearly in my mind.

"The Second Coming will take place in India.  Only here can the descent
of spirit into matter be understood.  In the West we are rooted in
convention, and gorged by too much print.  The Churches are losing
their hold on the young.  Perhaps the Early Christians were happy, but
now the West is sick with pain of its own begetting.  It awaits a new
interpretation of Christ in man.

"Life in India has not changed while Europe has been netting its land
with rails, covering the sea with ships, sending messages over wire.
Our feet have slipped in blood; and hers also have strayed into a
tangle of abstractions and absurdities.  But she is concerned with
deeper and subtler things than self-government.  In the wars which will
come surely and soon we may learn to know each other better."

"In the wars that shall come surely and soon!"  This was prophetic, if
pompous.  I was under the glamour of Mrs. Besant, of course, and it was
she who first led me to explore the Aryan path.


The heat, much as I cursed it, saved me from a good deal of dreaming
and the flail of everyday facts scourged out the introspective devils
that lurk in the corners of the soul.  I shut myself up in a darkened
bungalow, alone with my thoughts and dogs, but, when I tried to write
down what I felt, the pen slipped in my fingers, my hand made smudges
on the paper, and the draught of the fan scattered my writings.  The
more I bathed the hotter I grew.  The more I rubbed myself down, the
wetter I became.  So I was driven out of myself, into the sane world.

In November, too, squadron training began.  "B" Squadron moved across
the Kurram River, out of the hot-house atmosphere of Bannu to the open
plain of Mamroz.  For a delightful month we camped there.  We were on
the route by which Alexander invaded India; our tents between the
rubble of two of his cities.  Near one of them, while I was leading my
troop, Ur of the Chaldees sank into a Bactrian room.  But I had no time
to think of Alexander; one eye was on my Squadron Commander and the
other on a V in the dark blue hills of the horizon.

Leading the men straight for long hours in the sun and dust--six hours
in the saddle and never a minute between walls by day or
night--wheeling and charging and cursing the rear rank--the rear rank
is always cursed--and scouting and sketching and doing outpost schemes;
those days were amongst the happiest of my life.  The men were brothers
to us.  After lunch we played Rugby football, or tossed the caber.
Stables came at the end of the day.  Then the horses were rugged up,
watered, fed; the sun sank in a blaze behind the Soleiman Dagh; the
tired squadron gathered round its tureens of mutton curry and
flat-jacks; and we three British officers went to splash in canvas
baths.

The night air smelt very good when we emerged in our yellow fur-coats
and Gilgit boots for dinner, and the crescent of Islam rode in a clear
sky.  Sometimes there was a bonfire and a Khuttuck dance; more often we
all went to sleep by nine o'clock, sated with exercise and meat.

From my bed I could see the squadron, and beyond it the jagged hills of
Afghanistan, with Orion's Belt above them.  I used to struggle hard to
keep awake to enjoy the world a little longer.  There was a white mule,
a Houdini with his head rope, who was always loose: while I followed
his movements, consciousness could not slip from me.  I could see the
mist from his nostrils as he stood looking at the sentries who passed
and repassed the hurricane-lamp by the Quarter-Guard.  Now he regarded
me thoughtfully with the curious air of abstraction that animals assume
at night.  Now he was nosing under a tent-cave, where he had detected
some sugar-cane.  Now his long ears had caught the sound of footsteps,
and he moved away to sip delicately at the water-bucket in front of the
troop commander's tent....  And as I lay looking, and listening to the
tent's flap, I travelled back into a past within me buried deeper than
the Bactrian cities, and then forward suddenly: a miracle had occurred,
it was already morning.

Rveill rang out among the stones.  My white mule led his kindred, who
were already struggling out of camp with the syces to bring a day's
fodder from cantonments.  Horses stood dishevelled, with straw on their
blankets, shivering.  Men crept out of their tiny tents, clemmed with
cold.  Tea was brought to me, tasting of wood-smoke, and I drank it
before I uncurled myself, slowly, luxuriously.  For an officer, this
camp life was glorious; and even the men, who had not enough blankets
to cover them, and slept two by two to keep warm, would not willingly
have exchanged tents for houses.

When there are no such camps and no excuse to hunt and wander, what
will this world be like?


One day I chased a hare, and that hunting brought a train of
consequences, as a stone in water makes an enlarging circle of wave.
It so happened that I was temporarily in command of the squadron, which
had been left to me to take home quietly, doing a little drill on the
way.  When I saw this hare, however, I put spurs to my charger, for to
pursue a flying thing was almost automatic.  Besides, I wanted to test
the pace of Ur of the Chaldees over five furlongs.  Certainly I did not
mean the squadron to follow me.

Afterwards, the trumpeter said I had given the order to gallop, but I
imagine he mistook some unconscious movement of mine for a signal.

Whatever the reason, when I looked over my shoulder I saw the squadron
following me in extended line, with outstretched lances.  A ditch
loomed up.  I cleared it with a length to spare.  Not so the squadron.
Down went the horses' necks at the obstacle; some baulked, spilling
their riders; half a dozen pecked, and rolled over on landing.
Thoroughly disorganised now, the remainder poured after me in wild
pursuit, madder than Rupert's cavaliers, and as bloodthirsty as those
who followed the horned standards of Tamerlane.

Ahead was puss.

She made straight for camp, doubled back, tried to dodge between our
ranks.  A chance hoof broke her back.

A couple of raw country-breds, just out of training-school, had run
away with their riders.  Out of all control, they dashed straight among
the tents, falling there amidst a whinnying of tethered horses.

The squadron leader came out in his shirt-sleeves, biting at his
cheroot.  I had reined up in a muck of sweat, and felt foolish, sitting
there on Ur, amongst my delighted men, with a small brown thing at my
feet, kicking convulsively.

A sowar dismounted and opened his jack-knife.

"Kill it quickly," I said, for the hare was working its hind legs as if
it still hoped to escape.

The youth looked up in surprise.

"I'm not sure if the meat is lawful," he said, "but I will kill it
lawfully."  And with a muttered "_Al hamd 'ul 'illah_," he cut her
throat.

"What the hell----" said the squadron leader.

My explanation sounded thin.  However, we had the hare jugged for
dinner that night.

Over our madeira, the squadron leader and I discussed the necessity for
speaking to the Pathan in his own language.

"Urdu won't do," said my Major, "you must know Pushtu if you want to
command these blighters."

Now to learn Pushtu I should go to Peshawar, the metropolis of the
Pathans; and I pointed this out.  The squadron commander agreed, and it
was thus, thanks indirectly to the hare, that I found myself in that
city at the end of Squadron Training.


I learned more than the knowledge required to pass the Higher Standard
examination in Pushtu while I lived in Peshawar.

If you visit its bazaars by day, when roses are sold in the streets and
proud fathers carry their babies shoulder-high, you will see one thing.
By night, when the city gates are shut you will see quite another and
more intimate side of the Pathan.

Countries, like people, are loved for their failings.  I began to love
this frontier land.  But my eagerness to look into the Central Asian
heart had a purpose other than that which I acknowledged even to
myself.  To pass the Higher Standard was a reasonable ambition, but
what I really required for my happiness was to get out of the rut of
soldiering.  My life had been cramped into a conventional mould.  Now I
was beginning to shake myself free.

Western civilisation had bullied and bored me.  The floods of tears I
had shed over Latin syntax, my hysterical inability to construe, my
short sight (which kept me back at games) and an emotional crisis which
blighted my life at the age of sixteen, had left scars and
sullennesses.  I had not been a success at school.  Nor did I like
Sandhurst, except for the cavalry camp at the end of my time there.
Drill disgusted me.  I was hopeless at cricket and too slow for
football.  Here in India I was finding myself.

The nautch-girls of Peshawar, I had been told, were of a beauty to make
the dog-stars weep.  Their bodies were cypresses, their teeth camomile
petals, their eyes falcons of morning, their lips like Solomon's seal.
I went to visit their houses, therefore, in expectancy.

My Pathan friend and I were dressed in gold-laced waistcoats and jet
black turbans with gold fringes; we wore roses behind our ears; our
eyes were painted with collyrium; we carried daggers, and my friend a
favourite fighting quail in a small gilt cage.  We visited the
caravanserais of the Dabgari quarter which are hotbeds of Central Asian
intrigue and vice.  We fought quails and played _andhabazi_, the great
egg game.  It was an amusing world.

I learned to smoke hashish, whose local name is _charas_.  I heard
stories of Lughman Hakim and Iskunder and Aflatoon that were told long
ago in Baghdad by other Scheherezades.  Sometimes I understood these
tales and blushed under my walnut-oil complexion; more often I lost the
thread, but still listened, letting the accents and idioms of the
narrator sink into my mind.

My friend told the company that I was a Kashmiri, but I doubt whether
they believed that.  The women asked no questions, however, for our
rupees were as good as any others; their business was not to discuss
the antecedents of their visitors, but to amuse them: like the
_hetairai_ of the Athens of Pericles, they were hostesses as well as
courtesans.

I fell in love with a famous dancer--Masheen by name.  Her fee was
sometimes as much as a thousand rupees for a single night--rich men
gave her that, not milk-faced boys.  Her thumbs were adorned with
mirrors.  She had mesmeric arms and wrists.  Her whole body, from neck
to ankles, was aflash with bracelets and rings, and on her bare stomach
one emerald shone.  She was leisurely in her movements, a mistress of
time as well as her muscles, beginning always with her finger tips to
slow cadences, and continuing with hands and arms and shoulders until
the wave passed into her flexible body.  Then that too seemed to melt
entirely into the rhythm of the drums, which had now grown wild and
quick.  She seemed no longer human, but sound itself: her voluminous
skirts became the tapping of the _dol_[1] and her henna-ed hands the
fluting of the _serenai_.[2]  She was more than her dancing, having
transcended personality by merging with the voices of Creation.

Cross-legged, chewing betel-nut, and occasionally taking a pull at a
_charas_-laden hookah, I watched her first with curiosity, then
fascination.  Here was release and rapture.  As she danced on and on to
the music of her drunken drummers, some rhythm or religion from the
night of time sounded on my skin and gathered itself into my pulses.  I
could feel as well as hear the beating of the drums.

The smell of crushed geraniums brings back the memory of these Peshawar
nights.  The _charas_ I smoked made me sometimes imagine that I could
crawl through keyholes, and sometimes that I could step over the
Himalayas, but if it harmed my body at all, it shed a countervailing
blessing on my spirit, for by its aid I could always return to the
ecstasies and entrancements of the nautch.

Those infinitely subtle movements slid into my soul and spoke to me of
times long past, when the rhythms of the body were worshipped in the
pantomime of Creation, and David danced before the altar of Jehovah.
Somewhere in space these spells survive, for their delight is
deathless.  "He who is intoxicated with wine will be sober by dawn, but
he who has lost his senses to the Cup-bearer will not recover until the
Day of Judgment."



[1] Drum.

[2] Flute.




CHAPTER IV

THE DELHI ROAD

The day that I heard that I had passed the Higher Standard Examination
in Pushtu with credit, orders also came that the regiment was to march
south, and not only south, but to my old cantonment of Bareilly.
Moreover, eight beautiful babies were born to Daisy.

We were to march for three months, down half India, through the Punjaub
and on to the United Provinces, where we would find pig and deer and
panther, and lakes over which wild duck wheel, and old thatched
bungalows under the shade of mango trees.  In Bareilly, new doors would
open to my knocking.

On the last night at Bannu our men gave a display of tent-pegging by
torchlight.  They rode down singly first, galloping at a line of pegs
soaked in kerosene oil; and each peg came up in a whirl of fire.

Their cry was "_Ali, Ali, Ali--Yi-hai!_" ("Ali--I have it!")  One of
these paladins invoked the Name of the Lord of the Worlds, King on the
Day of Judgment:

  _Bismillah hir-rahman nir-rahim--
  Al-hamdul-illah rabi lalamin--
  Ar-rahman nir-rahim
  Malik-i-yumi din.  Yi-hai--YI-HAI!_


It was a fierce prayer, gabbled as he galloped at the peg.  He flamed
past us with eyeballs and teeth glinting, and could not stop his horse,
so that he rode the whole circuit of the field, twirling his lance and
roaring with open throat upon the name of Allah.  Then came sections of
four--Afridis and Khuttucks and Tiwanas and Khalils--thundering out of
the dark in their flowing white robes.  I was proud of the regiment!

Next morning, we trotted away in a long column of dust, with the
sunlight glinting on our lances through the kikr trees of the Kohat
road:

  _And I said, I will 'list for a Lancer
  O who would not sleep with the brave!_


For three months we marched, past Rawalpindi, Ferozepore, Ludhiana,
Rurki, and Lahore, moving faster, so the Colonel said, than the
horsemen of Alexander pursuing Darius.  The quick spring of India ended
all the quicker for our southward march.  The weather grew hot, and our
hearts light, for each day brought us nearer the Ganges with its river
grass and bamboo thickets, where the heavy boar wallow.

At Lahore, a strange thing happened in the gardens of Shahdara.  I went
to visit Jehangir's tomb there, with a friend and his bull terrier.
This dog came with us to the garden, but we tied her up before entering
the tomb, out of respect for a Moslem burial-place.

She whined and yelped, so when we were going up to the roof we asked
the resident Imam whether there would be any objection to her following
us?  The Imam shrugged his shoulders, and said that he had no objection
at all, but that he advised us to be careful.  My friend loosed her,
and she came rejoicing.  Another visitor with a dog took his also up to
the roof.

Now the wide flat top of Jehangir's tomb is bounded by a parapet.  My
friend's bitch hunted about for a moment or two, with her nose down, as
if she were following a scent.  Then she jumped over the parapet, and
was dashed to pieces on the path below.  It happened so quickly there
was no time to call her.  We ran down and picked her up while she was
still breathing, but every bone of her poor body was broken, and she
died before we could take her to a vet.

We did not go back to the place of tragedy, but next day we heard that
the other man's dog had done exactly the same thing a few minutes
afterwards.  Both animals committed suicide.  I can vouch for the
facts, but have no explanation to offer, except that conceivably the
dogs saw something that we did not.


_Dilli dur ast._

It is a far cry from Lahore to Delhi, but thither we must go at a
stride, lest this story grow too long in the telling.

While we were entertaining some friends in our mess tent at Delhi, a
sacred bull strolled through the camp with such a cocksure air that I
was tempted to make a bet that I would ride it.  It tossed me
tent-high, however, then tripped itself over a rope and fell sprawling,
outraged, amazed.  This was too much for Brownstone, who had been
watching the proceedings from his bathtub kennel: he squirmed out of
his collar and pounced on the throat of his hereditary enemy.  How I
pulled him off I cannot now remember, but by the time I had succeeded
in doing so a considerable crowd had collected, for we were in the very
middle of Delhi, opposite the Juma Masjid mosque.

Here was an insult to the Hindu religion offered by a brutal soldiery.
I had an awkward interview with the Colonel next day, and a pleasanter
one with the plaintiff Hindus, for I was so anxious to stand well in
their estimation that I would willingly have given them a sacred bull
a-piece, instead of the small contribution for the Sick Animals'
Dispensary which they demanded by way of compensation; and it was
therefore in a very favourable atmosphere that I was able to put a
question that I had long wanted to ask.

"A _guru_, Sahib?" answered the Brahmin whom I had addressed, "you can
find one in Benares if you go there."

"Benares is a long way," I said.  "Surely there are _gurus_ in the
capital of India?  You yourself, for instance, could tell me of Yoga."

"Sahib, you are a soldier, and the _karma_ of blood is blood.  You must
choose between two paths.  As it is written, 'If you are in the world,
be rightly of it.'  When you are old as I, it will be time enough to
turn to contemplation of things of the mind."

"I don't see why I shouldn't be a Yogi as well as a soldier!"

"Perhaps you could be both in your own country," the Brahmin answered,
"but not here.  In India we live in invisible cages."

"Invisible cages----?"

"Caste.  But we have no industrial system, nor do we condemn our girls
to the sterility which you consider natural if they do not succeed in
the competition for husbands.  We recognise the right of every human
being to a mate.  Yet the fetters we have forged through caste are
dragging us down--to the level of Western civilisation."

"We have nothing like your child marriage, _pandit-ji_."

"You make your children work when they should be playing," he answered
quickly.  "Besides, many of us disapprove of child marriage, but
customs that have grown up through centuries cannot be abolished in a
day.  Even in England the age of consent is still fourteen."

"I agree with you, _pandit-ji_, that we are far from perfect.  I love
my country in spite of her faults.  But I admit them.  I have long felt
that Western civilisation is sick.  That is why I want to learn about
Yoga.  If I did, would I be suspected of being a spy?"

"No.  Your own people might think you mad; but we would not think you a
spy.  There are no secrets to be discovered in Yoga, but there are many
things to be learned.  Yoga is not a medicine to take at a gulp.  Nor
is it a dogma.  It is a set of exercises.  You begin at the beginning
and go on steadily, for until the first exercise is mastered the second
cannot be understood.  The same is true of the integral calculus.  But
there is this difference--Yoga is a physical as well as mental process.
It is written that just as the sweetness of molasses can only be
realised by the tongue and can never be explained by thousands of
words, so Yoga can be realised only by the senses and never explained
by words.  You come from a culture that has made a fetish of the brain.
You come from a different climate.  You are young, confident that you
have only to say a thing and it is.  In India things are never what
they seem.  We are an old race, and our religions--for they are
many--are full of beauty and decay."

The spate of words stopped suddenly.

"I want to learn of their beauty," I said.

"Beware of it, I warn you.  But if you are serious, Sahib, I will tell
you of the first step in Yoga.  It consists in the cultivation of the
qualities of forbearance towards all life created, courage, secrecy,
concentration, faith, honesty, self-control, cleanliness, cheerfulness,
perseverance and purity.

"And humility," he added, as if it was an afterthought.  "Humility is
indeed very necessary.  Some of the _gurus_ make their disciples sweep
out the latrines of the untouchables with their hair.  I have a nephew
at Agra who is doing some such thing."

"Where could I find him?" I asked.

"I do not know exactly.  At a burning-_ghat_ probably.  His name is
Sivanand Joshi.  But I advise you to have nothing to do with Yoga.  You
Englishmen are practical about material things.  Be practical about
mysticism also.  Build your Rome brick by brick."

"I have no straw for the bricks of my mind, _pandit-ji_."

"When you are ready to build, Hazoor, you will find the straw.  It
always happens so."




CHAPTER V

THE KING COBRA AND THE HERALD OF THE STAR

Chance seemed to guide my feet towards the sages of the Ganges, and
animals.  The hare had awakened in me the ache for _ahimsa_.[1]  Then a
bull had helped me on the road to Benares.  Next, a king cobra uncoiled
itself as a portent of the things that lay about me, unseen.  But the
veils of _maya_[2] cannot be pierced save through experience.  They
twitched aside, then closed again.

The cobra came one afternoon in early spring when I was installed in my
bungalow at Bareilly.  I was studying maps of the district at the
moment, considering how best we should plan our camps during the coming
pig-sticking season; when unexpectedly--for it was the hour for
repose--Jagwant appeared.  He salaamed, and said that a man had been
bitten by a snake.

"What man?" I asked.

"Just a man, Cherisher of the Poor," said Jagwant.  "He is going to die
in the road outside our house."

I ran out to my bungalow gate, and found there a group of syces and
grasscutters gazing apathetically at a prostrate figure.

Evidently the man was a grasscutter who had been scraping up the sweet
_dhub_ grass by the roadside, for his implement was beside him and his
loin-cloth was half-filled with fodder.  A passing postman had seen him
and had told Jagwant.  Jagwant had gone to look, and had decided that
he could do nothing personally, for the man was of low caste.

His lips were already blue when we carried him into the verandah.  I
scribbled a line to the regimental doctor and sent Jagwant off with it,
telling him to return with some brandy (there was no pollution for him
in that).  Then I searched for the mark of a wound on the
grasscutters's scaly legs and gnarled hands, but could find none.

When the doctor came he found two livid spots on the palm near the
thumb, about half an inch apart, but it was too late to incise them.
The man was dead.

"I know a _saddhu_ who can bring even the dead to life," said a native
hospital assistant as soon as his chief had gone.

At my request, he hurried off to the bazaar, and returned about an hour
later with the _saddhu_, who proved to be an emaciated, ash-smeared
creature with matted hair, carrying a begging bowl and a flute.

Immediately, without a word to me, the _saddhu_ seated himself
a-straddle on the corpse, parted its lips, breathed into them, and
began a sing-song _mantra_, trembling violently.

"Your Honour," said Jagwant, who had observed those proceedings
gloomily, "I shall have to pay money to the Brahmins if he brings the
spirit back.  This is magic of the left-hand path."

But the _saddhu_ sat back with a sigh, took a pinch of snuff from a
fold of his loin-cloth, and said:

"I can animate the body for a few minutes to-night, Sahib, if you will
send it to some lonely place, but it is too old and weak and full of
poison to live.  The Great One that killed this man is probably in your
Honour's house, or near it, and I can of course make it come out of its
hiding-place."

"You shall have ten rupees if you can find the snake," I said: "but how
shall I know that it is the same snake?"

"I will show you the Prince," answered the _saddhu_ confidently, "I
have done the same thing for the _Burra Lat Sahib_ [the then
Lieutenant-Governor] and other _Burra Sahibs_."

As he entered my room, Brownstone rose and stretched himself, sleepy
and calm and friendly, but instead of his usual polite sniff at a
guest, the hairs on his back rose like hackles on a cock.  He waddled
away with stiff legs and limp tail.

The _saddhu_ peered and poked about my room.  Finally he said: "The
Prince is in this house," and sat down on the floor, with his reed pipe.

I took a chair, feeling rather excited, for no sound came from the
_saddhu's_ instrument, although he was playing it.  It was strange to
think that the snake might be already keeping time to the reed, waving
and weaving invisibly to this inaudible music.

After some ten minutes, Jagwant ushered in a waiter, carrying my
afternoon tea.  Brownstone came to sit by me, on the side away from the
_saddhu_, and gazed at the buttered toast with such intensity that
icicles of saliva formed at his chops.

"The Prince is there," said the _saddhu_, pointing to a box near the
bathroom door.

I went over and pulled it out from the wall, but nothing stirred.  The
squeak of Daisy's puppies came to us from an adjoining room, and the
_saddhu_ laid his reed down.

"There are too many dogs in this house," he said.  "My Lord is
distracted.  Will your Honour send them away?"

I told Jagwant to remove Brownstone and that Daisy and her children
must be taken to the sweeper's house.

"I can give you another fifteen minutes," I said, "while I change for
polo."

"He will come at once now, Hazoor," he answered, mopping his forehead.
"My Lord has been very close all the time."

Trickles of sweat ran along his ashy ribs and he was trembling again,
as when he had sat on the corpse.  He played, and I could just hear him
now.  For a minute he continued, then he rose and urged me with a
motion of his whole body towards the bathroom door.

Under the bulge of the tin bath a shadow lay.  I went closer, thinking
it would vanish.  Instead, it uncoiled itself like a whip-lash.  For a
moment I feared that the cold at the pit of my stomach would paralyse
my arm, but when the cobra hissed up on to its tail, with hood
outspread, I hit out with the walking-stick I carried, and fear
vanished.  I struck at it two or three times.  It was a hamadryad.

The _saddhu_ piped loudly, and rolled his eyes, inspiring me with an
unreasonable but instinctive revulsion.

"Hut!  _Hut_!  _Hut_!" said Jagwant, waving him away.

That was hardly fair.

"What is the matter with you, Jagwant?" I said.  "I want to talk to
this man who has saved us all from being bitten--and you hustle him out
of the house."

"Hazoor, the man is a Tantrik.  What does your Honour want with a
beef-eating magician?"

"That's my business."

When I paid the _saddhu_, not ten, but sixteen rupees, I told him that
I would give him yet another gold mohur if he would tell me how he
brought the snake.

He laughed at that.

"I can teach you a first-class card trick, Hazoor."

"I don't want tricks.  How did the cobra come to be in my bathroom?"

"It came, Hazoor.  That is all I know.  If you send it to the hospital,
the Doctor Sahib will tell you that its fangs are empty.  It killed the
grasscutter."

"How do you know?"

Again the _saddhu_ laughed.

"I know there is a cat in your roof," he said.

That was probable.  Polecats lived in many of these old thatched
bungalows, and there was the stain of one on my cloth ceiling.  He
would answer none of my questions.

"My eyes are sharp," was all he would say.  "So sharp that they go
through walls."

"Can I acquire your knowledge?" I demanded again.

"What does a great Sahib like your Honour want with such things?  I
learnt from my father and my father learnt from my grandfather.  My
father could pour water into his mouth and pass it directly through his
bowels.  My grandfather was waxed all over and buried alive for
forty-three days.  I can swallow five different coloured handkerchiefs
and vomit them up in any order you wish, and I can lift a cannon-ball
with my eyelids.  If your Honour wishes to see these things, I can come
again, but my _ekka_ is waiting to take me into the city, where I have
an appointment.  Salaam Hazoor!"


After polo, I questioned Jagwant on the subject of Tantriks.  He told
me that some of them were wise and good men, but generally difficult to
deal with.  It was best to avoid Tantriks.  Some of them ate dead
bodies.  Others ate beef.  Others could transport themselves to the
Himalayas in the twinkling of an eye and talk with tigers as friend to
friend.  One of their habits was to haunt the burning-_ghats_, where
they would put rice and _ghi_ between the teeth of a corpse--preferably
that of a woman who had died in child-birth--and summon a spirit into
it, so that it sat upright and spoke.  When this happened there was a
bugling of ghostly conches and a rattle of unearthly drums, very
terrible to hear.

I demanded that I should be introduced to someone who was an expert in
these matters.  As usual Jagwant salaamed.

Soon afterwards a Brahmin friend of his appeared--an overseer holding a
position in the Public Works Department--who unlaced his boots and left
them in my verandah before entering, although I begged him not to do so.

"In Benares you will find real _gurus_" he said, accepting one of my
cigarettes and speaking in fluent English.  "There are thousands of
teachers there of an unquestionable perspicacity and skill, sir, who
would look with disdain upon the art of charming cobras."

"Have you heard of Mrs. Besant?" I asked.

"Of course!  A great and good woman.  She is truly a mother to my
unfortunate country."

We discussed Theosophy for some time and finding that he knew nothing
about it, I tried to steer the conversation towards the Tantriks.

The pundit looked shocked.  He had never heard of dead men being
raised.  There was a _saddhu_ at Puri who claimed to be able to
resurrect sparrows that had been wrangled by breathing _prana_[3] into
them, but it was possible that he was an impostor.  He did not believe
such things.  When he had taken his B.A. degree he had studied
comparative religion and had come to the conclusion that all the great
faiths of the world were true, and none of them completely satisfying.

"Do you believe in God, _pandit-ji_?" I asked.

"Oh, no!  Not a personal God," he answered.  "Such vulgar ideas are
only for uneducated men."

The pundit would tell me nothing about his philosophy.  We were polite
to each other, but there was a barrier between us that nothing but time
or violence could have lifted.  I afterwards discovered he was no mean
Vedanta scholar and could have said more in half an hour than I could
have assimilated in a month.  But I had not remembered a very simple
thing: in the East information is not to be had for the asking.  The
Brahmins consider knowledge to be a dangerous tool, and the giving of
it to the ignorant like giving a razor instead of a rattle to a baby.

We Europeans are always giving something to somebody.  Christianity,
for instance.  Then education.  Now we give our ideas of democracy.
All this is alien to the Hindu mind which has outgrown the culture
which inspired that revealing hymn:

  _Can we, whose souls are lighted
    With wisdom from on high,
  Can we to men benighted
    The lamp of light deny?_


The high-caste Hindu is arrogant enough in his own way (coming as he
does from the same stock as ourselves) but he is convinced that no
illumination can be given to minds that do not wish for it; that no
outer theory can make men free; that no medicine will work while the
patient sleeps, except to the patient's ruin.

These differences go deep down.  We can bridge them with our brains,
but hardly with our hearts.  The best we can do, on either side, is to
avoid arrogance.


Very humbly and hopefully I went to Benares for a week at Christmas, in
order to discover whether I might there find the bridge that I sought
between East and West.  I sat at Mrs. Besant's feet on various
occasions, out on others I must admit I danced with two American
tourists (one fair, one dark) whom I had met at the hotel.  Looking
back on them, even from this distance of time, I am not surprised that
my attention should have been distracted from the holy city of the
Hindus.  It is true that I searched for Sivanand Joshi, and also
attended the lectures at the Central Hindu College, but my pursuit of
knowledge was not as diligent as it would have been had there not been
a curly head, and a pair of bow-shaped lips, and a Virginian burr in my
memory.  But for this frailty I might have become wiser.

Or again, I might not.

As to Mrs. Besant, she was all that I had imagined her to be in
eloquence, dignity, sincerity; and Krishnamurti, whom the esoteric
section of the Theosophists believed was about to become the Saviour of
the World, seemed a modest, handsome, straightforward lad.  But I was
very much disappointed in their friends.

Before the meetings, a venerable figure (who was later accused of
abducting the Theosophical Messiah, but acquitted) used to give us
lithographed scraps of paper containing messages revealed to him by the
Masters of the Great White Lodge.  On their way from the snows of Tibet
these thought-transferences seemed to me to have lost their sting and
degenerated into platitudes.  Krishnamurti generally sat on the
platform with Mrs. Besant.  On one occasion he spoke.  As bad luck
would have it I had made an appointment this evening to dine with my
friends, so I missed a scene which may (or may not) be remembered as
epochal in future ages.  For it was then that the Holy Spirit descended
on Krishnamurti.  "Great vibrations thrilled through the hall," wrote
an eye-witness afterwards in the _Theosophist_, "and the slender figure
took on a surprising majesty.  Indians, Europeans, Americans, bowed
their heads at the feet of the sixteen-year-old Brahmin boy, whose body
was shaken by the Coming Avatar, and asked his blessing."  These things
we missed for grilled chicken and Pol Roger.

I can never forget the debt I owe to Mrs. Besant.  But the masters, the
Great Ones, the Lords of Karma, and so on, were not for me.  The fair
and dark tourists taught me more of life.



[1] Non-violence towards all created things.

[2] Name, form, time, space and causation.

[3] Vital force.




CHAPTER VI

POLO

And now the scene changes to Naini Tal, a hill station near Bareilly,
where I am playing in the final match of a polo tournament.  The time
is a summer afternoon of the late Edwardian age.

My ponies are Daim, Tot, Crediton, with Ur of the Chaldees as a
reserve.  I'll give Crediton his breather first.  The white ball bounds
before us: Crediton follows it without touch of rein or spur.
Tap--tap--tap--I've dribbled it the length of the field and through the
goal at full gallop.  That is easier to do on this little Naini Tal
polo ground than on a field of regulation size.  Shall I be able to do
it again in the match?

Crediton has stopped, for he has seen the crowd and guesses that this
is the final.  He's sweating in front of his saddle and dancing from
side to side; and now his muzzle's on the ground.  He's bowing and
scraping....  He's hysterical.

Now for Daim.  You'll see the band from the middle of the ground, Daim,
without standing on your hind legs.  The noise puzzles you?  You
shouldn't think so much; it's bad for ponies.  And why, oh why, do you
have to twist your tongue over the bit?  Rubber can't hurt you.

Still five minutes to go.  Joey is hitting the length of the small
ground in a single stroke.  I wish I could do that.  Billy--our
captain--is talking with the umpire.  They're not nervous.  They're
both natural athletes, and both destined, as a matter of fact, to play
for England against America--Joey three times.

Nothing has _happened_ to my lunch.  Soup, meat, trifle have undergone
no diminution or digestion.  Sick?  Yes, it's curious how Nature can
make a violent effort of rejection when it would have been so much less
trouble to deal with the meal in the usual way.  And all this fuss is
only about a game.

I'm sleepy now, with funk.  Why don't we begin?  Flags and sun and
people.  I'm thick in the head.

I'll play Crediton first.  None of your circus-tricks: this is serious.
If I catch you bending... Rough-looking fellow, my opposing No. 1 with
a red head to match his jersey and native-made breeches and boots too
low.  The umpire is holding up his hand.  Beyond him I see parasols,
white dresses, glitter.  The ball's the thing.

"_Ride him, Y.B.!_"

Isn't that what I'm doing?  Crediton is leaning across the opposing No.
1.  We bear down towards the umpire, tussling: he has only to put the
ball at my feet and the game will begin.  But he whistles, and turns,
and sends us back.  All to do again.  I rein round in a daze.  Shall I
ever see the ball through this infernal sleep?  Now we are galloping in
step towards the umpire--now--now--and now!  The ball has flown past us
in the air.  Joey has it.  He turns, hits down the ground.  "_Ride,
Y.B.!_"

"Get out of my way, damn you!"

I am still entangled with No. 1.  No hope of catching the back, who
slashes down at the ball on his near side, returning it amongst us.
Billy meets it and dribbles it again towards the enemy's goal.

"_Ride, Y.B.!_"

This time Crediton and I overtake the back so that he misses his
return.  With a clean crack Billy drives the ball forward, past us,
towards goal.  There is a thunder and a crying.  The back and I are
neck and neck.  He is a big man, but his pony is out of hand, snatching
at the bridle.  Crediton leans on him, jerking his wise old head.  My
knee is behind my opponent's.  His grip is loosening and I am forcing
him off his saddle.

Billy is on the line of the ball, but he's being ridden-off.  Joey,
unmarked, bears down.  The ball is six yards from goal, in its centre.
Can he miss?  Not Joey.  He taps it through with a flick of the wrist:
the whistle blows: we raise our sticks and yell for joy.  First goal to
us.

Cheers and fluttered handkerchiefs.  Crediton faces the grand-stand and
begins to kneel down again.

"Hurry up, Y.B.!"

"All right, all right!"

The umpire won't throw the ball straight.  It has gone to their No. 2,
who is off like a streak.  The crowd cheers.  The ball bounces off
Joey's helmet, so that he can't hit a backhander.  Bad luck that, for
No. 2 is on it, and is tapping it round.  He'll never do it at that
pace.  God, he has.  He--has----!  It's a goal!

Whistle.  Yells.  One all.  We must begin again.  No, Crediton!  That
was a goal against us and that's what you get in the mouth for being an
idiot.

Where's the ball?  Under my feet?

"Get out!"

"Go to hell!"

"Get off it!"

It's mine, out of the scrimmage.  Hit or dribble?

"_Ride, Y.B.!_"

Must I leave it?  God, that's hard!

Joey hits a glorious ball, clean and straight.  Back and I are having a
great fight.  He curses me, for he is a portly man of nearly sixty,
while I am bony and ruthless.

"Damn it, can't you hear the whistle?"

Already?  I thought we had only just begun.  Seven and a half minutes
have passed.  This is the end of the first chukkar.

What's the matter?  I swing my leg over Crediton's neck.  It's his off
fore.  Lifting his gaiter, I feel his nobbly fetlock wet with blood.  I
run off the ground at his side, he on three legs.

"Well played, Y.B.," said Billy.  I hardly touched the ball, but praise
is sweet.

Daim is standing on his hind legs, again.  I wish I didn't have
temperamental ponies.  Will Crediton be fit for another chukkar?
Khushal is wrapping his legs in hot bandages.

"Well played, Y.B.," says Joey.

They've both said it, to encourage me, of course.  It does encourage me.

We line up where we stopped play.  Daim is on his hind legs when the
ball is thrown in, so that I can't reach it.  Then he jumps six foot
into space.  But I have it, somehow.  A tap now.  We're off.  We have
the legs of the field.  Just now I dribbled the ball the length of the
ground: I must do it again.  Hell's foundations quiver!  As my stick
came down the ball bounced, or Daim did.  Daim, you brute, we must bump
the back.

Back won't be bumped.  He's on a crafty Arab which turns on a sixpence
and leaves Daim cavorting about alone.  Wait till we race for the ball,
and then you won't see us for dust.

Is this chukkar never going to end?  The last passed in a flash, now we
seem to have been playing half an hour.  My throat's dry, and the reins
have rubbed my fingers raw.

"For God's sake mark your man, Y.B.!"

I can't hold Daim, that's the truth.  He needs two hands to stop him.
There's the ball.  I'll let the swine loose!

"Hi!  Hi!  God Almighty!"

Whistle.  Foul against us.

"Man alive," says Billy, "you can't cross like that."

A dangerous foul.  That means a goal to them.  In silence we ride back
behind our goal.  All my fault.

Our opponents take up their positions fifty yards opposite us.  The
back has only to hit the ball through our undefended flags.  Two
whistles.  That means the end of the second chukkar, so my misery will
be continued in the next period.

"We're holding them," says Billy during the brief interval.  "It can't
be helped about the foul.  Ride at him as soon as he begins to hit.
You never know."

Tot feels like a battleship under me.  I have had a sip of champagne.
The band is playing Bonnie Dundee.

Back is making his stroke.  He must be nervous with so much depending
on him.

Ride!  Can I hit a ball in mid-air?  I've missed, but why is Joey
yelling "_Played, Y.B._"?  He thinks I've hit it.  Well, Tot has, with
her hoof.  Billy is on the ball now, and I'm marking my man as I should.

Up and down we race.  I'm clinging desperately to the back, using him
as a cushion.  That's useful, anyway.  Time.  That period was quickly
over.  Is this match an agony, or is it bliss undreamed of?  One all,
and half time.

Can I ride Crediton again?  He's better on three legs than Daim on
four.  But Billy says that I must keep Crediton for the last chukkar.
So my choice is between Ur of the Chaldees or that indiarubber son of a
gun, Daim, who's cut my hands to ribbons.  Khushal has tied his tongue
down now.  It lolls out bluely, still over the bit.  I'll give him a
trial.  Yes, Brownstone; it's one all.  Can't you read the numbers?
Water on the back of my neck: how good it feels, dripping.

I think we'll win, if I don't disgrace myself.  The opposing one trots
out lame, goes back.  We wait.  He has reappeared on a black carthorse.
That's his reserve pony probably.

I've got the ball this time at last, and have tapped it forward to
Billy under Daim's neck.  Up and down, up and down.  Will the ball
never come to me?  I'm enjoying myself, though, bumping the back over
the side-lines, and turning under the carthorse's nose.  Here's a
backhander for me to hit--and I've hit it too, for once in a blue moon.
Daim, you jewel!  Joey has the ball.  Will he--won't he?  No, his shot
goes wide.  My stick's broken.  A spare stick--quick!  They have hit
out from behind, and No. 2 swoops down to our goal amidst a ripple of
clapping.

Goal to them, almost before I knew what was happening.  Time.  That's
the end of the fourth chukkar and the score's two-one against us.

"I wish to God you'd keep on the ground and try to hit the ball," says
Joey.

Yes, I know his censure is deserved.

Billy slices to the side wall as soon as we begin again: Joey takes the
rebound with a near-side shot.  Two inches more to the right, and it
would have been a goal.

"Meet it, can't you?"

I can't.  Tot is slow on her helm.  My stick weighs a ton.  These seven
minutes are seven hours.

The last period.  It is only forty minutes since I began this
living....  Crediton, poor, sweet, good angel!  If you die it will be
in a good cause, but you won't, for this game's gone to your head,
making you more than a horse.  Steady.  We've met it, by God!

I wish everyone would stop shouting.  I know I've got to hit that spot
of white.  The goal flags are a little to my left.  Now is our chance,
Crediton!  You are smooth and steady and fast; no one can catch us.

I am alone in the world with an open goal in front.  A steady shot: a
calm shot amidst the hoof-beats and cheers.  I can't bring my stick
down.  It's stuck.  Oh cruel, my stick has been hooked from behind.
I'm helpless.  The inviting ball bobs by; but Billy, bless him, is
behind.  And following him, trying to hook his stick, comes the
red-headed No. 1.  His hat's fallen off.  Will the umpire stop the
game?  I can't look or listen.  Back and I surge through the
goal-flags, scattering a group of spectators who shout even as they
run, for Billy has sent the ball true and straight, whizzing past my
face.

We're level.  Two all and six minutes to play.  There's Jagwant, solemn
and tall.  He is among a group who are waving their turbans--regimental
servants.  The crowd is a wild beast roaring for its food.

Quick back to the line-up.  Crediton is lame at the trot, but can
forget his pain.  I must get the ball again.  Yes, no, yes--I pass it
to Billy, who shoots, but the wind carries it wide.

The game is becoming sticky with tension.

"Don't stand on the ball!"

"Get to hell out of it!"

Crediton could creep under these scrums.  Yes, we've nosed-in among the
sticks, and are out with the ball.

But a bugle sounds, and I hesitate.  The umpire is shouting to me to
play on (for the rule is that when we are level we continue until the
ball goes out) but I have missed my stroke and the ball trickles over
the back line.  That ends the period.

After a minute's interval, we shall continue until one of us scores.
I'll ride Daim again, my fastest pony, chastened now by hard work.

"Stick to the back, Y.B.!" says Billy, "I'll meet the ball."  So be it.

When the umpire throws in, I hurl myself at my opponent.  Billy has it.
No, it is Joey, and he is taking it to the centre of the ground.  Why,
he's standing still!  For an instant, that seems spun out to years,
Joey stands there, a tower of blue and ivory, supremely sure of
himself, glancing now at goal and now at two opponents who are turning
on him.  He taps the ball tenderly in front of his pony's forelegs, he
aims, he brings his stick down with a crack that echoes yet in memory.

The driven ball sails low and swift.  I've reined up to stare at
Victory as she steals inch by inch over my senses.

Daim shies away towards the back whom he has been so cheerfully
bumping, for he understands riding-off, but not this voice of a ranging
beast that is coming from all round us.  How did Joey carve that second
out of eternity?  How has he conquered time?  The ball is still in the
air: as it reaches the goal-posts it rises and soars between them.  The
goal umpire is gripping his signal flag.  He's waved it.  Finish!

People are running all over the ground.  We've won!  That's all, Daim.
Bran mash for you.  _Baksheesh_ for the servants.  The syces will get
drunk, I suppose.


Head in a bucket.  Shake hands with Khushal.  Jagwant is salaaming,
rather lower than usual, but still impassive.  Joey has lamed two
ponies, and Billy one.  Now we must go to receive the cup from the
Lieutenant-Governor.  You've got the _baksheesh_ money, Khushal?  Good.
I'll borrow that comb.

A red-faced man has heaved himself out of a wicker chair and is handing
a silver bowl to Billy.

Hand-shaking with our opponents.  We are dining with them at the Club,
before the dance to-night.


We fight our battles over again at the bar.  Back shows me his bruises:
he is a tea-planter with a great thirst.  Three whiskey-and-sodas is a
good foundation for dinner--or isn't it?  Another?  I don't mind.  I do
mind, but it can't be helped.  My stomach shall be back's sacrifice.

But nothing will induce me to go on to the Lieutenant-Governor's ball.
I have had enough of crowds.

When the dandy coolies arrive to carry us to Government House, someone
says: "We'll race to the L.-G.'s."

That's a good idea.  I'll be the starter.

They're off, swinging down the path to the Boat Club.  The mellow
voices, of men who have dined well fade away and the jigging lights of
seven hurricane lamps grow small.  The procession is crossing the polo
ground now--a shout comes up through the firs as one lamp passes
another.

Here's five rupees for my dandy coolies: they can go to bed or pick up
a chance fare.

I'm alone in the grateful dark.

The Club smoking-room, through which I must pass to reach my bedroom,
is deserted save for an ancient Colonel, who is smoking a cheroot with
a straw down the middle, and drinking white curaao.

"Not dancin'?"

"Not yet.  I'm going to look round my ponies first."

The dogs are waiting for me: the puppies waddling crabwise towards
Daisy's teats, Daisy looking like Diana of the Ephesians, Brownstone in
a prancing mood, his great paws striking this way and that.  He is a
perfect friend, too good for me, all twisted up as I am in fancies and
philosophies.  He never thinks, but lives and loves and feeds and
fights....

Brownstone and I go down to see the ponies, who have supped on bran and
linseed and molasses.

Crediton staled blood after he hobbled home, Khushal says, but he has
no fever, and he has just drunk two buckets of barley water.  Daim's
tongue is badly cut, but his appetite is unimpaired.  Tot is lying at
full stretch, relaxed, a picture of equine content.  I put a carrot
under her nose.  She snuffles it, gobbles, sighs dreamily.  Ur is wide
awake; he cocks one ear back and the other forward, and turns his upper
lip backward in a grin, clowning for attention.  I enter his stall to
pat him.  He rushes to the corner in simulated terror, ears flat back,
off heel raised.  I slap him hard: he turns and nips the air, then
muzzles into the haversack in which Khushal carries carrots and sugar.

Below us, the syces are banqueting by firelight.  They have six
hill-women with them and they all seem sober.

I wish I was.  This life I lead is a drunkenness in itself, an
intoxication whose natural complement is strong food and drink.
To-night I've had too much of it; too much of everything.

Good-night, Khushal, I'm tired.  Does he notice I'm not walking
straight?  He can't help smelling drink, with his unpolluted senses.
But most of us smell of alcohol and tobacco.

Up and up, with Brownstone panting at my heels.  Drink and dinner is
being blown out of me.  Brownstone has his second wind: ten days ago he
thought he couldn't walk in the hills, but now he has caught my mood.
We are following the path that leads to the crest of Cheena, behind the
Club.  Soon we shall be above the houses of Naini Tal.

"The albatross knows its way about the sea better than the most
experienced captain."  Where did I read that?  It is true.  Instinct is
better than knowledge.  My life as a soldier is jolly enough while it
lasts, but its pleasures are as fickle as the fumes of champagne.  Here
on the mountains, alone with my thoughts and my dog, I am sober again.

The Himalayas stand up before me in the moonlight, so close, so high,
that I catch my breath as I lift my eyes to them.

Dear mountains which India has worshipped since the dawn of history,
before your mighty towers and turrets, your lonely heights and snows,
your music of tree and water, I am humbled and content.  I bless your
silence and peace, cities of the Aryan soul.

Far below that white and blinding beauty, gleams the lake of Naini Tal.
By its shores, and along the huddled houses, lights wink and pass.  On
the opposite mountain glows a replica of the night sky of London, from
the invisible Government House, where there are medals, bows, whispers,
pride, painted faces.

And here, in a grotto by the pathway, is a shrine.  I strike a match.
Brownstone stands on his hind legs, and together we peer at the red
symbol of Siva, decked with a garland of marigolds.  Above it, roughly
carved out of the rock, his slender-waisted and great-breasted goddess,
smiles with her full lips and her long eyes, as she writhes in her
ceremonial dance.  She is his _shakti_, or creative aspect.

To live we must be created.  That is how we may become aware of
eternity.  Siva is the Lord of Change: his consort is the Mistress of
Time: their children do not grow up, or age, or die: but change.  That
is all, and everything.  Brownstone puffs and wheezes beside me, a link
with sanity, contemptuous of the gods of desire who drive the world.

These little games I play, and all this striving and scheming and
sorrow, make up the world in which Brownstone and I pass as phantoms.
Soon the lights of Government House will be swallowed up, and its
bricks will crumble, and all our works of power and pride will be
transmuted to colloidal particles and gases.  In the twinkling of
Siva's eye.

These mountains on which Brownstone and I are standing, the greatest in
the world, will be worn away rock by rock, in the revolution of the
centuries, as Siva and his consort tread their measure, until at last
this Age is danced away, and Brahm, wearying of His world, shall sleep.

Change and fixed purpose; names and forms dissolving and reappearing;
an infinite beauty and a precision beyond imagining through all kinds
of apparent cruelty and confusion; a stirring in the womb of night; a
glimmer out of nescience; sleep again--that is this world of desire and
death.  Sleep.  We may know that as reality, my dog and I.

Soon the sun will flood the Ganges in a glow of gold and turn to
vermeil the white domes of Delhi.  Before me Ushas, the twilight maid,
type of all the loves of Earth unsatisfied, will drive her chariot
through the east; and Surya, her lover, will rise from his haunts in
the nether world to pursue the light of morning knowledge.  We shall
wake to more pain, more pleasure.

But to-night as I lie stretched on these pine needles, the desire of
experiencing has left me utterly.  Mother Earth has emptied my head of
thoughts and Brownstone's jowl is on my chest.




CHAPTER VII

PIGSTICKING

Half a dozen of us are lying inert on camp-beds behind mosquito
curtains, in the big banyan grove, near Ratmugri Bagh.  We are
listening to the prelude to another day's pigsticking--beaters
chattering to each other as gun-wads are distributed to them as tokens
exchangeable for their daily wage of twopence, servants quarrelling for
amusement, the cook pelting a prowling village dog, the dignified
burbling of the camel which is being saddled for its journey to the
railway station to bring ice and letters.

There is the Shikari, tall, grey bearded, with Grecian profile coming
to tell the Tent Club Secretary of the prospects of sport.  You can see
by his bearing that he carries in him the _genes_ of a conquering race
(the Robilla Pathans) but he is as much a native of these plains as any
of the Hindu beaters whom he curses so heartily and picturesquely in
the idiom of the country.  With him are two elders of the Tent Club
staff known as Paderewski and Kubelik.

They are remarkable old men, these wild-haired headmen of the Nuts.
Respectable villages will have nothing to do with the Nuts, for they
are a Criminal Tribe, whose men are professional thieves, and whose
women are whores, yet for all that they are a decent people.  They
might engage in much more profitable business than the beating-out of
pig for us to ride, but sport is more to them than money, and they are
content to toil all day for a pittance with the Tent Club, often in
peril of their lives.  Civic virtues they lack, but fortunately there
is more than one standard of worth in this world.

Our horses are saddled, and the two elephants are ready--Mod Lai with
his howdah and crate of lager beer packed in wet straw, and Lashkman
Piari with her pad, on which nothing but a medicine chest is carried.
If there should be a casualty, it will be her office to convey the
sufferer to hospital.

Last night I gave her a rupee for herself.  She went to the
neighbouring village, dropped the money into the _baniah's_ lap and
helped herself to as much sugar-cane as she could carry in her trunk.
Now she opens her mouth and raises her trunk sky-high in an impressive
_salaam_.  She is a snob, like most elephants, and thinks I'm rich.

Mod Lai is not so sure of me.  Mod Lai belongs to a Rajah (whereas
Piari's master is only a _zamindar_) and attends all the _tamashas_ of
the district--marriages, festivals, tiger-shoots.  He had seen two
generations of men come and go, and has salaamed to two Viceroys and
knelt to a King.  He is old and conservative, and dislikes the look of
Brownstone.  None of the great men he has met had a dog like this.

There is a cool wind from the hills, and a scent of flowering bamboos
from a near-by _bagh_.  What if the butter is rancid and the eggs
stink?  Sun and air are food on these marvellous plains.

The Shikari has mounted his flea-bitten mare.  The Nuts, with their
mongrel dogs, move off in a separate group to the other beaters, for
they consider themselves a caste superior to the villagers while
pigsticking is in progress.

After drawing lots for our positions, we separate into "heats" and ride
off to our appointed places.  We are to beat Ratmugri Bagh first, a
glade of linked bamboo thickets, full of shade and water and good
rootling-grounds.  In its pools several _bahut bhari baba_ have been
seen wallowing at their ease--"very heavy grandfather pig"--and we are
reasonably certain of good sport.

My first horse to-day is The Devil, a bright bay country-bred, out of
an Arab mare by a thorough-bred English stallion.  He is the best
charger I have ever owned.

While the beaters are tapping their slow way through the thicket, he
lifts his beautiful head; nostrils wide, ears cocked; hearing,
smelling, seeing, every nerve tense as he dances round and round my
bridle hand.  Two peacocks prance out of a ride, screech, flap back to
the village.  Dust-whirls dance in the yellow plain, shimmering away to
the pale goddesses of the Himalayas.  Leaves and branches stir to a
light wind.  It is good to be alive on such a day, with pipe in mouth
and a good horse ready.  A sow looks out of her shelter, goes back,
gathers her family together--six blue-black babies with a gold band
round their bellies--and leads them all out past us not twenty yards
away.  They stop when The Devil snorts.  He wonders why I don't mount
and ride?

The squeakers stand stuffily, wondering who we are and what we want.
When they are older, they'll know.  The Devil quits prancing and
pawing, for he has guessed, I think, that they are too small.  He
sniffs the air, snatches nervously at some grass, jerks up his head
again to listen to the yelping of the Nuts' dogs.  I can recognise the
voices of Jim (the terrier) and Majira (the semi-dachshund bitch) and
Bachu (the half-Airedale).  Yes, Bachu has stirred a boar out of his
sleep.  Bang!  That's the Shikari's blunderbuss, to speed the parting
guest.  One, two three, come the sounders out of the _bagh_, with a
dozen pig in each.

God, how glorious!  The plain is black with pig, and amongst them are
at least half a dozen rideable boar.  My heat has swung into saddle
without a word.  We don't ride yet, however, for we must give the
quarry time to break clear of cover.

The Devil's heart is drumming between my legs.

Lashkman Piari comes crashing out of the _bagh_ at a trot.  Her mahout
takes off his yellow turban and waves it and yells to us as if we
hadn't seen the six big boar and their thirty brothers and sisters
streaming across the _maidan_ under our noses.

Now another two sounders have broken towards the group at the far side
of the _bagh_, a mile away, and are making along the canal.  I can see
the riders mount and cram down their hats and raise their spears.
Through the heat-waves the sun looks distant and fantastic--_maya_,
maybe?--that Becoming which is  not illusion.  The notion flickers in
my mind and is extinguished, for the time has come to ride.

We're off, each after a boar of his own.  Mine is a big red one.  I
cram heels to The Devil and we eat up the ground between us and our
prey.

But as soon as he sees that he is being pursued, down goes his head and
up his heels, with a spurt of dust behind them.  He is making for
Khaitola, a _bagh_ some two miles away.  If he keeps to that line I
shall certainly kill him, for it is open going and The Devil can
overtake even a lean young boar within a mile.  This one is fat, and
obviously short in wind and temper.

He begins to tire, and sits down so suddenly that I can't stop.  As I
pass, reining hard, I see his little bloodshot eyes with the hate of
the world in them, and his lips' wicked lines, snarling back from a
pair of remarkably fine tushes.  He is up again by the time I have
turned The Devil, and is making for some road menders' pits near the
river.  It is foul going here; he stumbles and rips at the earth that
tripped him.

Then he sees a tethered goat, and disembowels it in his rage.  Just
with a flick of his neck as he gallops by!

The goat is done for.  I must stop.  Poor goat--what a fate--what a
mess!  A thrust to the heart, and it is out of its pain.

That has lost me several lengths, but now the boar is loitering again.
He is one of the red, truculent sort for which Bareilly is famous, who
would sooner fight than run.  As we draw up, he stops, about turns,
charges.  It all happens so invisibly-quick that I can hardly put my
spear down.  We meet at eighty miles an hour and my spear-point strikes
the top of his skull, grazing down his shoulder.  There is ajar, a
scuffle.  I turn The Devil with an oath and an unkind hand on the bit.

The boar has trotted to a bush where only the ridge of his back is
visible.  I have at him again, but The Devil's thoroughbred skin is so
delicate that he refuses to face the thorns.  Five, ten minutes I wait,
cursing myself for a clumsy fool.

The Shikari canters up on his old grey mare.  Behind him comes Lashkman
Piari and some of the Nuts.  The Shikari is very angry.  Why did I stop
to kill the goat?  This is the best boar in Ratmugri Bagh.  Unless I
have wounded him badly he will recover his wind and make a dash for the
river and get away.  Shall I go in on foot, I ask him?  "Don't be a
fool, Sahib," growls the old man, waving to the elephant.

Lashkman Piari ambles up with a distinct smile behind her trunk.  Why
she enjoys this business no man knows.  She is as nervous as a kitten
on a bridge, dithers at slippery going, and becomes idiotic with fright
at a quicksand, yet when bidden to stamp on a wounded boar--the most
dangerous brute in creation--she is transformed into an Amazon and a
heroine.

The Devil is snatching at his bridle, and nibbling grass again,
trembling, in a lather of foam.  Piari, with her trunk lifted out of
harm's way, heaves her big feet about among the thorns.  _Woof_!  The
boar is away, making for the river, as the Shikari said.  I am on his
tail, though.  He can't escape me now, for I am between him and his
goal.

Almost I'm sorry, because the advantages are all on my side.  Yet the
boar is too noble for pity.  I see him calculating the moment that he
will charge: "Give me liberty or give me death!"  My spear is well down
this time.  He throws himself on it.  A fountain of blood jets up.  He
is dead, only about a hundred yards from his sanctuary.

In the open, the odds are against the boar, but in blind cover he has
more than an equal chance against a man.  That is one of the purifying
risks of pigsticking.

The other two of my heat have wounded a thirty-six inch boar who lies
in a patch of thick thorn.  We must go in on foot.  The elephants
cannot push their way into the tangle and it would not be fair to ask
the beaters to risk themselves.  Three of us, therefore, creep to his
lair.

The dogs have been leashed.  It is dark where we are.  In front of me
something grunts, crashes, splinters wood.  The man on my right gasps;
he has been charged and knocked down.  A small wound in his breeches
drips blood; his spear is broken.

We work round again to the boar.  There he is grunting and crashing and
charging--but whom?  A disorderly pulse hammers in my throat.

I smell pig overpoweringly.  A great head, each bristle on it distinct,
confronts me out of the thorns.  Something hits me in the ribs; it is
the butt of my spear, which the boar has driven into me as he passed.
I've wounded him, but far back.  I run to the edge of the bushes and
see him struggling out, treading on his bowels.

He makes for Paderewski, who attempts to avoid the charge by jumping up
his pole.  The boar trips (for he is spent and dying) and falls on his
knees.  Before he rolls over jerks at Paderewski.

Lashkman Piari hurries up with the medicine chest.  Paderewski is
holding his leg tightly, for his thigh is cut to the bone.  The Tent
Club Secretary gives him half a tumbler of brandy, then a little ether.
I dissolve a pellet of disinfectant in soda water.  He is white to the
lips under his brown skin, but this kind of thing is all in the day's
work; he has suffered a score of woundings in our service.

The veins knot at his temples, but he does not wince when I feel his
leg for a fracture.  Nothing is broken this time, and the stitches can
wait for the hospital.  What's that stuff to stop bleeding?  Hyoscine.
A wad of that, and now we hoist him on to the pad elephant.  He brushes
back the long hair tumbling over his eyes with one hand, and stretches
out the other for more brandy, grinning, undismayed at his twenty-first
mishap.  He will get no less than sixpence a day of blood money while
he is being mended.

The Sahib comes next.  His wound is larger than we thought, but only
half an inch deep, looking like a streak of lightning on the inner side
of his thigh.  We put him beside Paderewski on the elephant and send
them both back to camp.

Now Moti Lal yields up his stores of lager beer and damp cheroots.  The
beaters squat round in a circle, nibbling grain and parched barley.
Three boar have been killed this morning, and they are well content,
although none of them has more in his belly than there is in a London
pigeon's.  Twopence a day is not much, even in India, but they have
seen good sport from the shade of Ratmugri.  Now a harder-earned
pennyworth of work is in store for them, for we are to draw the grass
country by the Ganges, and they will have to walk miles and miles,
knowing that every step they take they may tread on a pig, panther, or
even the King of the Jungle himself.  No doubt they will have much to
tell their wives this evening.

The Devil goes back to camp, where barley water and hot bandages await
him.  He whinnies and looks back as he is led away, as if to say that
one run is nothing for a big horse with a light-weight in the saddle.
That's true, but he is too precious to risk so early in the season.

Ur of the Chaldees is also a country-bred, slower of foot, but quicker
of brain.  Indeed he is as clever as a man, and thinks more than is
good for a horse--qualities inherited from the Arab sire.  In blind
country I can always trust him to pick his way; and on the tail of a
pig he knows exactly where to place himself.  When we fall, which is
often, he stands patiently beside me, waiting to be mounted again.  A
bit is unnecessary in his mouth; nothing but a white rope-halter has
adorned his intelligent face for more than a year now.  If he were only
a little faster, he might win me the Kadir Cup.

On a small scale, this _jhow_ pigsticking is like the hunting circle of
the Mongols,[1] who drove every living thing before them, gradually
drawing in their line for a great slaughter, followed by a great feast.
Our quarry is the boar, but everything else in the jungle flies in
front of our horses; hog-deer who scuttle between beaters' legs, and
hares, and cyrus-cranes, whose staid flirtations it seems boorish to
interrupt, and wild cattle, nilgai, peacocks, panther----

A group of beaters, sauntering by a grass-fringed stream, have stopped
and run together like frightened sheep.  The Shikari gallops up; but
his mare plants her forelegs and refuses to move, for she smells what
is lurking there.

With a snarling that freezes my blood, a panther flashes by me in a
streak of gold.  We pursue him, but the _jhow_ is so tall that it hides
even our horses, and he is soon lost to view, which is just as well,
perhaps, for there are only two men alive who can face a panther with
their hog-spear, and be sure of killing him.  Now the beaters go
forward again lightheartedly.  A kingfisher dives smartly into the
Ganges.  The shadow of a hawk passes over the wet sand.

I am feeling thirsty, and ride down a rutty road to a village, past a
mango-grove where monkeys gibber.  A yellow and white dog squirms and
barks when I reach the little mud houses of Shikarpur; a water buffalo
lowers its long horns; women at the well veil themselves.  I am an
unwelcome intruder.  One of the girls is young and beautiful; I ask her
for water, but she shivers, and presses both hands to her face and
turns to the wall.  Is that coquetry, or convention?  I am as innocent
as I am thirsty.

I explain my need to a merchant, who comes out of his shop salaaming,
white as the flour he sells.  He searches for an earthenware vessel,
and gives me to drink.  But I do not tarry, for I know that I am not
wanted here.

I am hated in this kind village.  The doves flutter scatheless round
the village shrine; peacock tread the earth delicately and proudly,
knowing that they are held precious; even the monkeys that loot the
_baniahs'_ shops are sacred; but this white monkey that has ridden into
the village on a stamping horse, grasping a hog-spear, has brought
pollution with the very air he breathes.  The cup from which he has
drunk will be broken.


I am back with the line in time to see a pig break to another heat.
Six hours we have been in saddle--and the last three without a hunt.
Yet I could go on like this for ever with the magic of the Ganges
plains before me.  Here land and air are wide and worthy of giants.
The crops, the soft-eyed oxen, the far horizon, the white masses of its
north-eastern limit, the dim blue _baghs_ to southward, the pig, and
peacock, and panther, and scurrying deer; all sights and sounds under
this turquoise vault, except mankind, are heart of my heart and carry
in some mysterious fashion memories of another life.  A life in which
the freedom of the villages was also mine.

Riding with me is the Civil Magistrate of the district, a good
sportsman and a good officer, loved by his people.

"Do you think," I ask him, "that it is possible to know India--I mean
the life of the peasants?"

"It is possible, but unwise," he says.  "The people don't ask for
friendship, but fairness.  They want someone from the outside to judge
them.  All that is necessary is to be accessible to them when they come
with their complaints."

"And that isn't as easy as it seems, I suppose?  Do you think for
instance, that these villagers of yours have to bribe their way to your
presence?"

"I hope not," he says: "for I ride about the district a great deal.  Of
course I know there is a danger that my servants may take _baksheesh_.
But I have an old retainer whom I trust.  He comes with me everywhere."

"That old man?" I ask, nodding to a grey-beard who follows us with a
_chowri_, to keep off the flies.

"Yes, I trust him absolutely."

The Collector has hardly spoken, before a peasant flings himself under
our horses' feet.

"I have only four rupees," sobs the suppliant, "for years I have been
trying to bring my case to you."

"Four rupees?"

"Yes, Cherisher of the Poor, that man"--pointing to the patriarch with
the fly-whisk--"wants five rupees to allow me to enter your Court."

That evening, after we have finished drawing the _jhow_, an enormous
swarm of pig--a line at least half a mile in length--comes streaming
out of Khaitola Bagh.  It charges through a herd of cattle, scattering
them in all directions, and darkens the plain with bodies of all sizes
and both sexes.  Each of us has marked down a monster for his prey.
Mine is a beauty.  Ur cocks his ears, I do believe he's judging its
weight.

He's a fast boar too.  Ur can't gain on him at first.  Khaitola Bagh is
close.  If he jinks now, I'm done.  I wish I had The Devil!

At last we draw level.  Then, a foot too far away to spear him safely,
my quarry turns in a right-angled left-handed jink.  I flatten myself
in the saddle, and thrust at him, across Ur's forelegs.  Crash!  Flump!
Where am I?

My mouth is full of dust and my nose of pig.  I'm pinned to the ground,
face down, and there's a most unpleasant pain in my legs.  I can't move
them.  Twisting my neck, I see the sweat-lathered hide of Ur, looming
above me.  His rope halter is in my left hand, torn off his head.
Well, if that is all that is broken ... Ur is struggling to get up,
damn him.  The pig is on his other side, transfixed by my spear, which
is also under Ur's body.  A carrion hawk observes us three unwilling
bed-fellows, expecting something.

I can only wait.

My thoughts go back to England, where I hope to be, come May year.  I
have lost a tooth.  I wish I had a quart of lager beer.  Ur shall have
a bottle too, if we get out of this mess.  Lawn tennis is a good
game--it doesn't jar.  The Adjutancy--promising young officer cut short
in his career--paralysis?  My brain is buzzing like a clockwork mouse.
I wish Ur would either get up or lie down.  I'd rather die quick than
continue in this pain.

The pig is wriggling himself off the spear.  I must think straight.
Run straight, I mean, if I get the chance.  Now Ur's heaved himself up.
He's nibbling grass, the idiot.

Can I run?

Can't I?  There's a tree.


I don't know how I've come here.

Does this swollen blue thumb belong to me?

The pig is dead with my broken spear in him, and the earth is heaving
under him.  And under Ur too, who is grazing in a billowy plain, with
his saddle twisted under his belly.  Men and horses and elephants are
approaching through an earthquake.


With a wet towel round my head, I am allowed to attend the evening
ceremony of weighing and measuring our five mighty boar.  Those of us
who have obtained a "first spear" examine the tushes of their victims,
while our syces press round us, watchfully, for it is their perquisite
to take away the bristles along the spine, and various other parts, one
of which is reputed to be an aphrodisiac.  When all the particulars
have been entered into the Tent Club log, the bodies are given to the
Nuts, who will cut them up and gorge themselves on pork to-night.

Then there is the paying of coolies.  A hundred men squat before us in
a semi-circle; each holding a gun-wad in his right hand.  The Tent Club
Secretary has a stick and a bag of money, the Shikari, a lantern, for
it is growing dark.  The Secretary counts the men, while the Shikari
collects the gun-wads; every eighth man is tapped with a stick, which
is a signal for him to rise and receive a rupee to divide with the
seven beaters on his left.

Finally we attend to casualties, not only our own but any sick folk of
the neighbourhood who care to come.  Our methods are quick, drastic,
popular.  No medicine which does not taste horrible is administered.
Quinine we mix with asafoetida; itch we cure with neat sulphuric acid;
purgatives we have a-plenty, and ginger; and Easton's syrup, but only
for eminent and elderly preservers of pig.  For miles round our fame
has spread.  One of our members is a distinguished surgeon; we allow
him to deal with the difficult cases, but the Secretary and I are more
popular as consulting physicians, Paderewski needs a great deal of
brandy, poor old chap, and is given enough to put a guardsman to sleep.
Then Lashkman Piari's mahout comes to report she is feverish, and as it
has been a good day he is given half a bottle of whiskey, which he
solemnly shares with her.  Ur sups off a Bass and cooked barley.

For me there is no dinner to-night.  I lie on my bed near the
mess-table contentedly enough, listening to the tales of the veterans;
how the great hog of Saidupur jumped upon the back of a horse; how the
gods of the temple by the curving stream of Shahi were propitiated by
_baksheesh_ before we drew the covert; how Wardrop manages the Meerut
Tent Club; how Faunthorpe kills panthers; how we speared ten boar on
the sunlit plain of Kicha; and of the prowess of those great horses
Sausage and Cowdapple, and Bohemian, and Fizzer--a saga of stories that
will never be written.

By my bed lies the Abb Dubois' _Hindu Manners and Customs_ to remind
me that I once met a pundit who told me of a nephew of his.  The book,
however, remains outside the mosquito curtain.  Instead of reading, I
sharpen my hogspear.

I file away with my swollen hand, and spit blood.  When I lie flat, the
bed rocks gently, as if I were floating.



[1] The _Kurultai_.




CHAPTER VIII

MEN AND MUD TURTLES

One morning, after I had become Adjutant of my regiment, I noticed on
recruits' parade an Afridi shepherd lad, round-thighed and awkward in
the saddle, who was rolling off his horse like the White Knight.

His ride was in the jumping lane: at each obstacle Nairn Shah (for his
mother had named him "Merciful King") leant forward, snatched the reins
in his mutton fist, and jerked them so that he cut his horse's mouth.
I put him on another horse and the same thing happened.

His new horse was an easy one.  I rode it over the jumps myself to show
him how simple was the task I asked him to perform (forgetting that I
had ten years' experience and he ten weeks) and I explained that he and
I would stay here all day, if need be, until he stopped funking.

He scowled at that, but it was necessary to be firm, for if a beginner
loses his nerve, he may never regain it.  I sent the rest of the ride
away, and ordered him to mount.  He hesitated.  I jumped off my horse
and stood by him with my hunting-crop, and called him a coward, and
worse.  We were man to man in a sense, for I would have fought him
level and probably been worsted physically had he mutinied.  But unfair
advantages were on my side--my rank and experience against his
innocence and ignorance--the military system against a sense of what is
decent between man and man in a free country.

He mounted in a dumb rage.  Not content with his sulky obedience, I
lashed his horse's quarters, sending it careering over the first two
jumps.  His long body leant first this way, then that.  At the third
jump, after the turn in the lane, he would infallibly have been
unseated, but the horse (infected as animals sometimes are by a
contagion of human emotion) instead of keeping to the track galloped
straight ahead, and tried to jump the enclosing wall.  Failing to clear
it, it hung for a moment, balanced on its belly, half in and half out
of the lane.  Nairn Shah still sat with his arms crossed.  Then the
wall collapsed, and he was crushed against it.

My heart stood still.  Rage melted into pity, and hate into love.  He
lay on the tan, with the horse beside him, entangled in reins and
stirrup leathers.  The Drill Major and I pulled him out, dazed.  I knew
it would be worse than useless to say anything at the moment.  So I
sent him back to his ride of recruits.

Later in the morning, I told him in the presence of his comrades that
he was excused foot drill for a week.  But he only looked at me in a
curious sullen way, meditating revenge.

That night, as I lay on my bed in the open air, hot and restless, and
not at all well pleased with myself some impulse made me get up and go
back into the verandah.

What I expected to find there I do not know, but what I did find was
Nairn Shah, in the shadow, hesitating, bare-headed, with turban round
his loins, as is the habit of Afridis when raiding.  I went to him, and
took both his arms at the wrist.  "_Se de, wror me?_--What is it,
brother?" I asked.

He began to stammer.  To-morrow was Saturday.  His troop commander (a
cousin of his) wanted to borrow my rifle for black-buck shooting.  He
had not wanted to disturb me.

"Did he send you to me--at night?"

"Yes."

It was a lie, but rather a good one, for the troop commander did
sometimes borrow my rifle.  Nairn Shah had come for another purpose.
We stood still, close to each other, so that I felt what he did not say.

"Come inside, brother, and tell me what is the matter."

We went to a long chair, and he sat down on its arm beside me.

"Thou hast made my face black," he said, using the pronoun of equals.

"I am sorry for it, as you must know."

Silence.

"You have a knife under your coat," I said.

"Yes, Sahib."

"Discipline is a hard thing.  But it is necessary in the Army, because
officers are not perfect.  You must do as you are told, even when you
are wrongly abused."

"In my country a man would be killed for speech like thine."

"You are young, and so am I.  Let us be friends."

The tap of the night-watchman's stick came to my ears.  Nairn Shah sat
there wordless, his eyes wet.

"How did you get in without being seen?" I asked.

"I am an Afridi," he sobbed.  Then, as if that had explained
everything, he added "The _chowkidar_ mustn't know that I am here.  It
might be misunderstood."

I was silent until the night-watchman had clip-clopped away.

"I know why you came, Nairn Shah, and what you wanted to do," I said.
"Let's forget it."

"You were right to call me a coward, Sahib.  Otherwise----"

He unbuttoned his coat and showed me the dagger he carried, smiling as
he tested the needle-like point on his finger.

"It was common sense, not cowardice, that kept that in its place," I
said.  "Why make such a fuss?"

"Sahib, shall I ever be able to ride?"

"Not only will you be a roughrider, Nairn Shah, but within a year I
will make you my orderly, if you behave yourself.  Now go the way you
came.  And----"

"Yes, Sahib?"

Breast to breast and knee to knee we took leave of each other.

For months I did not speak to him again.

Before the year was out, however, he had proved to be the best recruit
of his class.  The Colonel marked him for promotion (without any
recommendation from me) and he would have become a lance corporal but
for the fact that he steadfastly refused to learn to read and write.
Scholarship bred worms in the brain, he told the Drill Major.  So when
Khushal Khan left the regiment on the death of his father to look after
his property, Nairn Shah reigned in his stead, and brought with him his
young brother, Sher Dil, a lively lad of eleven.


This little Lion-Heart (for that was the meaning of his name) had
love-locks curling down from either ear, and the features of a
Donatello angel.  He and Nairn Shah were like a double almond, always
together.  Wherever I went with the regimental polo team, Sher Dil
would come too, as a mascot and stick-holder.

One evening in Calcutta, where we had gone to play in the Championship
Tournament, it occurred to me that Sher Dil was likely to fall into
evil ways, exposed as he was to the temptations of a great city and a
vagabond life.

"Sher Dil," I said, "why aren't you at school instead of sucking the
thumb of idleness?"

Sher Dil didn't know.

"Why isn't he at school?" I asked Nairn Shah.  "This life is bad for
him.  Who paid his fare in the train?"

"No one paid his fare, Sahib.  He travels with the horses, and refuses
to go to school."

"Refuses!  He is no bigger than a mongoose, and refuses to go to
school! ... Without book-knowledge, Sher Dil, you will remain poor,
like your foolish brother.  But if you learn to read and write you may
easily earn fifty rupees a month by driving a motor car."

"I don't want to drive a motor car, Sahib, but to be always with you."

"_Shaitan-ka-bacha_, by the time you are a man I shall have left this
country.  Put no faith in me, or any Sahib.  Stand on your own feet.
There is no power and no virtue save in the Most High.

"You spoil your brother," I said to Nairn Shah.  "Why _don't_ you send
him to school?  Is there any reason except your prejudice?  Look at
Rissaldar Hamzullah Khan.  Learning hasn't done him any harm."

"Sahib, you don't know Sher Dil," Nairn Shah answered thoughtfully.

I admitted that.

"Then you must know," said Nairn Shah, "that before I brought him down
into India, he quarrelled with Gul Must, my youngest brother, may God
give him peace.  Sher Dil had a hunting knife, and to give point to his
argument, he stuck it into his brother's belly.  Gul Must died.  Sher
Dil was surprised, but he said nothing about it to any of us, and he
hid him in a thorn bush.  In the fort that night, Gul Must was missing.
We asked Sher Dil where his brother was.  He said he had not seen him.
But some other boys told us that they had been playing together.  So we
went out and found the body.  Then Sher Dil confessed, and he confessed
also that he had tried to set fire to the bush.  When the Malik heard
that, he called a council to consider whether he should be put to
death, for to burn the body of a son of Adam is a very shameful thing.
But I pleaded with the elders and showed them that Sher Dil was a pious
child, for even then he could repeat both the Fatiha and the Cow[1] by
heart.  Now he knows all the Koran Sherif.  So the _jirga_ decided to
exile Sher Dil to British India.  That is why I brought him down to
you.  No one except my relations knows about his blood-guilt, Sahib,
even in the squadron."

"Certainly Sher Dil must go to school," I said when I heard this story,
"and if he becomes as learned as he is pious, I daresay he'll be a
great man."


I wonder what did happen to Sher Dil?  I lost sight of him in the war,
but heard later that he had enlisted in 1918 in the Supply and
Transport Corps as a "boy follower."  Neither Nairn Shah nor I have
been able to trace him: he has disappeared: he may be dead now, or he
may be a rich contractor.  Much will have been forgiven him for the
sake of his _beaux yeux_.


I was very busy with the Adjutancy this year of 1912, and anchored to a
mass of pale brown paper.

Who that has served in India does not know those mind-defeating
documents beginning: "Will you kindly refer to this office memo.
O.P./110/26713 dated 15.2.30" and ending "for favour of necessary
action"?

As I write, a memorandum is before me which has pursued me across years
and continents.  It asks me (after five years' absence) to fill in a
form allocating my periods of service under Provincial Governments
(with dates) the Central Civil Government (with dates) the Marine
Department (with dates) the Railway Department (with dates) the Post
and Telegraph Department (with dates) the Military Department (with
dates) and to give the period of leave I took during the whole of my
service "with nature of leave."  A _babu_ evolved this document in
Lahore, and only another _babu_ could answer it in London.

Similar conundrums arrive daily, by dozens, in every civil and military
office in India.  If tyranny exists in that country, the despots are
those mild and well-meaning men who are snowing-under the
administration with sheets of foolscap, smudgily typewritten and
illegibly signed by Deputy-Assistant-Something-Or-Others.  The _babus_
write to each other.  We sign their letters, scribbling away our
birthright amidst mountainous files, and losing all touch with the
people of India.

Every day I wrote away until two o'clock in the afternoon, with the
Head Clerk at my elbow to see that I did not miss anything.

By dinner time, a new flood of paper was ready to engulf me.  Accounts.
Objection statements.  Confidential documents.  Secret papers in three
envelopes, of which the innermost was sealed.  And a pile of petitions
which were not trivial only because they were human.  A syce demanded
ten days' holiday to Benares, in order to burn his mother, who had just
died there.


Benares!  Why had I allowed five years to go by like a dream, a flash?

Agra!  Sivanand!  During all this time, my conversation with the pundit
had lain fallow in my mind.  Sometimes it would bob up to the surface
at odd, impossible moments, but more often it had remained unseen, an
idea working in the dark.  Fifty pleasures and duties and anticipations
had kept me from the path that my inward eye had detected.  Yet the
inward eye sees more clearly than the frontal stereoscope.  It sees
what is good for us, as the compass needle points to the north.

I called for one of the beige papers on which applications for
temporary leave were made out and signed my name at the bottom of the
blank sheet.

"Please fill in this form for me," I told the Head Clerk, "and have it
counter-signed by the Colonel, whose permission I am going to ask now,
and then have it sent quickly to the Brigade."

"Yes, Sir.  What is the time, place and purpose of the holiday?"

"I am going to study the Kingly Wisdom and Kingly Mystery of the
Unborn, Undying, Unbegun, _babu-ji_.  I am going to Agra, and hope to
return a wiser man."

"That will be ten days only, Sir, unless it is to cut into your
privilege leave.  Agra.  Recreation.  Very good, Sir."


Propped up on my sofa, I lay watching the delectable landscape that
unrolled itself before the window of my train.

My future seemed clear.  Here were the plains of India, made for the
pursuit of pig; and beyond them the holy cities and the mountains.
Between the two my life was to follow pleasant paths.


In the twilight that precedes the dawn, I was standing on the far bank
of the Jumna at Agra, looking across river to the Taj Mahal.  One
should come to that light and lovely tomb as I approached it that
morning, for then it will be seen as its builder intended, across a
foreground of water.

I knew that if I did not find Sivanand Joshi here, I should find
another.  I was under sway of the sanctuary and the hour.  I felt a
rightness in the time and place--and a growing exaltation.  Destiny had
led me here: not eyes, nor ears, nor nose told me this, but the skin,
through millions of avenues.  My fate had been built up day by day out
of a thousand actions and reactions.  It was for this moment that I had
waited and worked.

On the crescent that crowns the dome of Mumtaz's tomb, the heralds of
the morning had come.  Where I stood it was dark, but the dome had
begun to glow like a pearl, like a monstrance above an altar.  For me
it was a symbol of the unity of worlds visible and invisible.  One
greater than Mumtaz was there, Unity itself.

The life I led as a soldier and this jubilant dawn were but the forms
and guises of reality, the veils and vestures of ultimate truth....

No one can describe the contact with Reality which is rapture, yet
everyone, I suppose, experiences it at some moment of his life.  The
most we can do is to put down a few inadequate words that report not
the thing itself, but a memory of light, and more light.

The sense-world slid away, and I sat no longer by the river, but by an
ocean of bliss.  It was a glimpse, a gathering-up, a heightening of the
senses on every plane, not least the physical--an effulgence of
eternity.  I think that this was a turning point in my life: the
sharpest turn.

Treading on air, in the freshness of that morning, I strolled along up
the river, following my feet, and arrived at a rustic funeral.  The
relations must have been poor, or miserly, for the pyre was of green
wood, and smouldered.  But death has no terrors for the Monist; and
there was no sadness in that simple rite.  For five thousand years the
Hindus have faced the dissolution of the body in the lofty spirit of
the Rig Veda:

  _Thine eyes shall seek the solar orb,
  Thy life-breath to the wind shall fly,
  Thy part ethereal to the sky,
  Thine earthly part shall earth absorb._

  _Thy Unborn part shall Agni bright
  With his benignant rays illume,
  To guide thee through the trackless gloom
  To yonder sphere of love and light._


Only the burners of the dead still lingered by the body.  The
next-of-kin had already sent the spirit to its home on the wings of the
sacred _mantra_--"Go forth and follow the ancient paths our fathers
trod."  The flames burned low and like a witch's oils, and the
scavengers of the Jumna--its crocodiles and tortoises and
pariah-dogs--awaited all that remained from the pyre.  I walked on, and
almost stumbled over a sack-like object huddled at my feet.  It was
dressed in Yogi's yellow, and was looking at the dark river--not across
it to the Taj Mahal in the splendour of the risen sun--where the eddies
of the Jumna swirled.

The figure turned, and looked up to me with a frank, unfaltering
regard.  I was puzzled as to its sex, for its face was powdered with
wood ash, and its mouth gentle--a woman's rather than a man's.  Ropes
of black hair hung from its shoulders.

"Who are you?" it asked softly and in a boy's voice.

"I am an officer in an Indian Cavalry Regiment," I answered, listening
to what I was saying with some surprise.

"Why do you come here?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

"I am a _brahmacharin_[2] from Benares," he said.  "My father is a
_pandit_ there.  I read up to the Matric. exams.  Then I became tired
of this world and turned to the greater wisdom."

So saying, he pulled out from under him a part of the deerskin on which
he sat cross-legged, and motioned to me to take my place beside him.

I did so, wondering whether I had at last taken a jump out of my daily
life, or whether I would be disappointed again.

"I would like to be a Yogi," I heard myself saying.

"Many men wish to follow the Way, but it is not for all."

"How can I find it?"

"The journey is a long one, Sahib, even to initiation.  If you find the
path quickly, it is like finding money quickly--quickly lost again.  So
my _guru_ says, and I am sure he is right, although I have never had
any money to lose."

Was he a beggar?  I laid before him two silver rupees and a gold mohur.

He looked at the gold mohur doubtfully.

"With that I could take the train to Katgodam," he said, "and join my
_guru_, who is going to the hills.  But he told me to stay here another
year."

"Does your _guru_ always go to the hills and leave you in the plains?"
I asked.

"Yes, he goes every year.  He teaches me for three months at Benares.
The rest of the year I earn my living by begging.  Take your gold
mohur, Sahib.  These two rupees will feed me for two weeks."

So saying, he put them into a small box, in which I noticed some
Virginia cigarettes.

"So you smoke?"

"A little.  After _pranayama_[3], sometimes, or when the stomach is too
empty for comfort."

I opened my case and offered him my cigarettes.

"I ate gram and drank milk last night," he said, "a big meal.  And all
night I slept here, so I am neither tired nor hungry now."

"And wanting nothing?"

"Except wisdom," he answered, "and the man from the West.  Perhaps you
are he."

"Is your name Sivanand Joshi?" I asked with a jump.  "If so, I met your
uncle at Delhi."

"I have an uncle at Delhi.  But it was my _guru_ who told me that an
Englishman might come."

"Will you take me to him, then?"

Sivanand looked at me with level eyes.

"Will you take me to Benares?" I repeated, "or wherever your _guru_ is?
We will go together.  You said you would like to see him again."

"Katgodam is a threshold.  Beyond it we cannot pass."

"Katgodam is a railway terminus," I said, "and from there we can go
anywhere we like.  Come, we will find your _guru_."

"Sahib, I will tell you a story," said Sivanand blandly, looking down
to the river again.  "When I first began to study the Science of
Sciences at the lotus feet of my _guru_, I was always asking him how
soon I could attain God-consciousness.  So he told me of the
_brahmacharin_ who said that he desired _samadhi_[4] more than anything
on earth.  This _brahmacharin_ and his _guru_ were bathing at Gunga-ji
at the time.  Suddenly the _guru_ took his pupil by the neck and
plunged him under water.  After a time he began to struggle and kick.
The _guru_ let him come up for a moment, just long enough for him to
take one breath and to hear his teacher say that he would give him
God-consciousness if he could bear it.  Down he went again, and
remained under water quietly, waiting for the Clear Light to shine.
But blackness came, instead of the Clear Light.  And as the
_brahmacharin_ could not find bliss by drowning he began to struggle
violently and escaped from the _guru_ and ran away.  The _guru_ went on
bathing as if nothing had happened, and the _brahmacharin_ waited for
him, fearfully, on the bank.  'Do you still want God-consciousness?'
the _guru_ asked, when he had finished his prayers.  The _brahmacharin_
touched his master's feet and answered that he did.  'But what did you
want most when you were under water?' asked the _guru_.  'Air,' said
the pupil.  'Then you don't want bliss as much as breath,' the _guru_
answered, and the _brahmacharin_ had to admit that that was the truth.
So he was sent out as I was, to seek wisdom by begging and meditation
When my first year was over, my _guru_ taught me a little, and then
sent me out into the world again.  Five times this has happened, and I
am not ready yet for the high and secret things which he will whisper
to me when the time has come."

"How long will it be to your initiation?"

Sivanand shrugged his shoulders, without answering.

"I wonder," I said, "why your _guru_ told you to wait here for a man
from the West?"

"He did not tell me to wait here.  But there is no difference between
one place and another.  You would have found me, wherever I happened to
be."

"I was told, years ago, that you were in Agra."

"I have been to a hundred places since.  If you had been ready, your
mind would have led you to any one of them.  Everything exists in Mind.
That which men burn here was never diseased or dead: they offer up a
sacrifice to that Becoming which is an aspect of the Godhead.[5]
Existence-consciousness-bliss is never diseased, or dead, or burned,
but always and for ever free from the conditions of _avidya_.[6]  So to
find one's _guru_ is a simple matter, once the aspects of the
sense-world are seen for what they are."

"I do not understand that."

"I shall tell you another story, Sahib.  In the beginning of this Kali
Yug[7] there were two _saddhus_ in the Himalayas who discussed together
how they could make themselves more comfortable on earth, for near
their cave there were many rocks and thorns which cut their feet.  One
of them suggested killing a quantity of cows and tanning their hides
and spreading them over all the earth as a carpet.  The other _saddhu_
considered this for a year.  Then he said 'I have a better plan.  Let
us kill one cow only,' he said, 'and put its leather on the soles of
our feet, instead of on the earth, so that wherever we walk there will
be a carpet below us.'  These two were the first Yogis.  There is no
difference between one place and another, one woman and another, one
religion and another, one _guru_ and another.  The differences are the
veils of _maya_.  You and I cling to them still.  But when we are
strong enough to know them for what they are, we shall rule our fate."

"And I shall find my _guru_?"

"If you go to Benares, Sahib, you may find your _guru_.  You may.  I
cannot tell.  But I will give you his name, since I was told that you
would come.  It is Paramahansa Bhagawan Sri.  Having humbled your heart
and slain the desire of works, you may find him."

They were slow, dreamy words, spoken not to me, it seemed, but to the
Jumna which was carrying down the white flowers and the yellow flowers
that are the daily tribute of India to her gods and goddesses.

Amongst these flowers rose an arm, as if waving a good-bye.  It sank
under the even waters, without sound or ripple, but the turtles had
seen it and were coming from every direction, making tracks like the
periscopes of submarines.

A big white turtle reached the body first, and worried it, and raised
its obscene idiot's head with a ribbon of flesh in its mouth, snapping
and gobbling.  Others arrived.  Soon there was a red foaming and
scuffling where the body of a girl had been.

I turned away, but Sivanand did not flinch.

"_Sarvam Khalvidam Brahman_," he said, "--all this is indeed God."


Somewhere in the distance, a bugler sounded rveill.  Its notes
drifted to me across the flower-strewn water, with its corpses, and
turtles, and the reflection of the splendour that Shahjehan had made
for the love of a woman.



[1] The first two chapters of the Holy Koran.

[2] Ascetic student.

[3] Breathing exercises.

[4] That bliss which is knowledge of the One.

[5] Maya.

[6] Ignorance.

[7] The Iron Age.




CHAPTER IX

BENARES

Hysteria was close to Sivanand and all his world.  These Yogis, it
seemed to me, had the logic of lunatics.  Was the everlasting solitary
introversion of the Brahmins indeed more spiritual than the ethic of
the beef-eating Briton?

The question kept recurring to me, both now and later, but the
appraisal of differences and distinctions is a sterile pursuit, and I
tried to put such thoughts out of my head.  Whether or not the Brahmins
were wiser than men of my own race, they had certainly an ancient
culture whose exploration might fill my life and the lives of many
others.  It was an adventure, this blending of the creative impulse of
the West with the traditions of the East, a new quest that might lead
mankind to new Eldorados.

In Benares my search would begin.  There I should discover the answers
to my questions, if they were anywhere to be found.  I would leave
aside my mental note-book and my innate tendency to seek for analogies
and comparisons.  I would be a Hindu, in imagination at least, and walk
the swarming streets not as a man of this century, but as a medival
pilgrim to Canterbury, or as a child who had listened to Peter the
Hermit.

Such was my intention.  In Peshawar, some years ago, I had been a
Pathan to all intents and purposes.  But in Benares, as soon as I had
settled myself there for a proper visit, I knew myself to be a
stranger.  I could not go back through the centuries: I could not view
my surroundings with the eyes of indifference.  Some reforming devil
would up.

With a part of me I wanted to sweep out the twisted by-ways of the holy
city, to disinfect its temples, rebuild the crumbling river-front, put
fly-proof netting round every sweetmeat stall.  Yet I knew that if a
reformer were to attempt to do such things I should join in his
execration, for then Benares would be herself no longer.  The city
fascinated me and repelled me, like Yoga, like India.

It was no good pretending the repulsion did not exist: Benares is an
incarnation of the Hindu mind, full of shocks and surprises.  You
cannot view her through the eyes of the flesh, or if you do you will
want to shut them.  Her real life burns in the Unconscious.

Her outer life is passed in the temples and by the river.  The temples
are terrible, the river beautiful.  In the temples there is a worship
of foetus-like figures, smeared with red, that lurk amidst the acrid
corruption of milk and wilted flowers, and cattle-ordure, and bats and
blood.  Elephant-headed Ganesha is there, with her silver hands and
feet; and the discs representing the Regents of the Planets; and
serpent-girdled Kali; and the blue-throated god himself, Siva, who
swallowed the sins of the world that men may be immortal; and the
symbol of the sexes, united and complementary.  These things the
Brahmins will assure you--and it is true--are not idols.  The true god
is Brahm.  For the rest, the world had worshipped always the same
divinities under various names, symbolising Desire, the eternal driver.

I turned away from these squalid sanctuaries.  Corruption stank in my
nostrils, but my soul smelt something different.  At the Durga Temple a
headless goat twitched in its blood; close by a peasant couple fed the
baby monkeys with parched gram, and a little boy brought a piece of
lemon peel to Vishnu's altar, in case the god was thirsty.  Pigeons
nested between the gold plates of the dome of the temple of Siva, and
within, a cow munched the votive wreaths festooned round the _lingam_
of the Lord of Names and Forms.  These things were not meaningless, but
their meaning came to me from far away, along pathways my brain had
never used.

The river, on the other hand, was intelligible.

There is no sight more wonderful in all the world than the
crescent-sweep of the Ganges on a bright morning, when Benares is at
prayer.  In that lustral rite, in which a hundred thousand people
share, the squalor and superstitions of the streets are forgotten; we
see here the ancient Aryans, still living in their descendants,
glorying in sunlight and water, praying to God rather than to demons,
untrammelled by the accretions of the centuries, and out of the clutch
of their many-armed idols.

Three miles of crumbling palaces that lie in tumbled heaps with other
palaces growing out of their ruins; and a confusion of richly-carved
cupolas pushing their way between tamarind trees and tall flag-poles;
and a fluttering of endless companies of pigeon among a forest of straw
umbrellas; and below them a multitude of people who worship by the
glittering water--peasants and priests, beggars and monstrosities and
dwarfs, sacred bulls that have been married to four holy cows, cows
with five legs, sleek girls with a skin of ivory and very poor and
parched old women, fat merchants and thin fakirs, wise men and madmen,
old and young, birds and beasts, all mingling on the bank and washing
in the sacrosanct waters of the Mother--that is the river-front at
Benares.  The Ganges is so pure that you may drink beside her sewers,
or amongst her corpses.  She sprang from the feet of Vishnu, and from
her was born the Hindu race.  Her waters are jewels to the eyes of the
living and a sanctification to the parted lips of the dead.  Her cult
is ageless and casteless.

The worshipper first offers flowers and rinses his mouth in her holy
water.  Then he kisses the earth she fructifies.  Then, entering her,
he worships the four points of the compass, raising his right hand
three times, so that a trickle of diamonds drips down in homage to the
risen sun, and whispering the oldest prayer known to man--the
_Gayatri_--with which the Brahmins have greeted the Giver of Life for
the mornings of five thousand years.  Then he submerges himself
completely in the Mother, rinses his loin-cloth, and returns to the
river-steps.

In the temples, the cow's excreta is clean, but I am filthy.  We
creatures beyond the Brahmin pale may not touch a thousand objects in
the city, but here, lovers of Gangi Mai, we are one people.

If I stood on my head at the Bathing Place of the Sacrifice of the Ten
Horses, I should only be doing as a dozen others.  Even less
conspicuous should I be at the Scindia Ghat, which is the favourite of
all the forty-seven bathing places of the city with the _brahmacharins_
and ascetics of every cult, who come here to find a peace the world
cannot give.

At the Scindia Ghat I am myself.  Myself in skin and marrow.  A
sympathy reaches out across I know not what gulf of time and ancestry
to unite me to these people.  Some are insane, some have diverted their
vitality into their burning eyes, so that they live only above the neck
and not in thought as I understand it at present, but all have a goal
before their eyes which is also my goal.  They are fellow-travellers on
a difficult journey, some madder than I, some stronger, and all freer,
less tied to names and forms.

In another life I have practised these austerities.  I have sat
cross-legged, like that _brahmacharin_, with the sun in my half-closed
eyes, restraining my breath.  I have stood on one leg, like that
stork-like youth, whose right foot is tucked into his groin.  I have
balanced on my head, like those two naked Yogis (as a child I was
always looking at the earth inverted).  I have been that girl, with
caressing eyes.  She is myself in another incarnation.  Surely she will
recognise her poor kinsman?  She is sitting cross-legged, in
_padmasana_, the ancient lotus-posture, with soles of the feet turned
up and placed on the thighs.  Buddha sat like that, and many before
him.  I also have locked my circulation at the femoral arteries
listening, listening to the tide of all the world's vitality in my own
body.  She could, if she would, bring back that vanished time.  But how
shall I attract her attention?  Is it polite to call her from nirvana
to my foolish questions?

Near her, an old man is rolling over in the dust, holding a baby above
him.  Over and over he rolls, keeping the baby always in the air.  Is
the action symbolic of something?  The baby finds the rotary motion
agreeable and sucks its thumbs and smiles, but what kind of Yoga is
this?

"What kind of Yoga is this?" I say out loud.

The girl draws a deep breath: it ripples upwards under the ochre sheet
that covers her, expanding first her stomach, then her ribs.

"He is going to the shrine of Kali, Sahib," she says.

"But why does he go like that?"

She does not answer.  Ought I to know?  Or doesn't she?

"I have come here to find a _guru_."

"There are a thousand _gurus_ in Benares."

"It is better to follow no saint than six."

"You know our proverbs: you also know then that a student may not
reveal the name of his Master?"

"I didn't know that.  I am looking for a particular _guru_, named
Bhagawan Sri."

"The Paramahansa!" she exclaims, looking at me with velvety but
passionless eyes.  "He speaks English.  I can take you to him, if you
like.  He lives on a pier by the house of Tulsi Das."

Shall I give her a rupee?  Yes, she will understand that it is a
ceremonial offering.  I touch the back of her right hand with the coin:
she turns it up, extending her slim fingers without a word.

"Will you take me to him?"

"Are you a missionary?"

"Of course not.  I am a student, like yourself."

She smiles a little, and her eyes assume a far-away look, beyond me,
beyond Mother Ganges, beyond earth.  Unless I keep silent she will help
me not at all.  She is more incalculable than Sivanand, less sensitive
perhaps, but more firmly centred.

Are we conversing subconsciously?

She uncurls her legs and rises, smoothly, like a yellow mist.

"Come," she says, "but slowly.  I cannot walk fast."

Why cannot she walk fast?  What rigours have crippled her limbs?  Her
body is lithe and young, but she stumbles, and walks like one in a
dream.

On our way we meet a legless man, scrabbling in the dust with flippers
six inches long, and nails growing in them, disconcertingly.  He begs
for alms and his gourd is empty.  A rupee to him, to bring me luck.
Here are three boys, squatting on a bed of spikes; and an ash-smeared
creature, distorted out of human semblance, who is hanging head
downwards over a fire; and a thin man, pulling in his navel so that it
almost touches his backbone; and a crone loaded with chains, and
another with a withered arm held aloft.  How much masochism is here,
how much fraud?

How many women Yogis are there?  My guide shakes her head.  Has she a
_guru_?  She will not answer.  What sufferings has she undergone, and
to what end?  This girl is as baffling as Benares.  Her eyes are
lambent with love, but not for me.  She will take me to the
Paramahansa, but she absolutely refuses to give me any information.

I found the Sri sitting under a large umbrella, by a pier that
projected from the house of the poet of the Ramayana.  He was
middle-aged, clean-shaven, bald, naked save for a loin-cloth and the
sacred thread of the twice-born.

"I was expecting you, Sahib," he said joining his finger-tips in answer
to my salutation, and bowing, "for Sivanand has written to me of you."

"You speak English perfectly," I said, sitting down beside him and
feeling at home.

What could be more natural than the fruition of my hopes?  For six
years I had desired this meeting.  Now it had happened.  Time is
nothing in India.  Karma rules all, and the belief in its influence is
infectious.  I felt neither hurried, nor eager, nor surprised: this
talk was planned before my birth: I had chosen the womb that should
give me ears to hear it.

"Certainly I should know your language," said the Paramahansa, "because
I have had every opportunity.  But that is a long story and I expect
you are in a hurry, like all Englishmen.  I understand you want to be a
Yogi.  You know that there are two Europeans already studying with me?"

I had not known this, and it disconcerted me a little to find that the
_guru_ was reading my thoughts more exactly than I knew them myself.
At the back of my mind had been the idea that I was doing something
original.

"I am in no hurry, Sir," I answered.  "I have waited six years since I
met your _cheela_, when I was at Agra.  He told me that I might come to
you.  As to being a Yogi, I am not sure whether I shall have either the
time or the opportunity.  I have come to ask you what Yoga is about."

"I am afraid I cannot say anything clever," said Bhagawan Sri, "like
your Western lecturers.  Moreover if I could show you a path straight
and clear from your present world to the Brethren who live in the
Himalayas--and I cannot do that--it would not help you at all, for at
the ending of the road you would find nothing you had not brought with
you.  The Way is in your own heart.  It exists only there."

"There is nothing, then, but imagination?"

"From Brahma to a blade of grass, all is an aspect of Becoming.  Brahm,
not Brahma, is the only Truly-existent One, and it is profitless to
discuss Him."

"Then what can be discussed?"

"Everything except the Original Cause.  If you study the Science of
Sciences for a few years you will understand why.  The laws of mental
involution are no different from other laws: you cannot see the
Mysteries with unquickened sight.  You must not shut your eyes to the
world, but rather develop the wings you have in order to flutter
towards the Most High.  I admit that a knowledge of the physical
working of these wings is not absolutely necessary, but I and those
that think with me believe it to be useful.  Man has achieved bliss by
a religion of rapture alone,[1] but the Way we follow is different.
Instead of dragging the physical senses behind us like so much lumber,
we ride them as beautiful steeds.  The Clear Light of Reality may be
seen by the mind, by the heart, and by the physical senses; but mind
and heart and body are never really apart.  There is nothing but the
Self.  The body is an ant-heap of activities, living out their lives in
its sun.  To the lives within you, you are God, and these lives are God
to principalities and powers invisible.  They are in you and you are in
them, for without them you could not live, as our God could not live
without us."

"Amongst all these creatures," I said, "how can I pretend to be the
One?  In all this realm of knowledge how can I be the Knower?  Above me
as well as below me extend ranges of temperature and vibration that my
consciousness cannot know.  If I say there is nothing but the Self in
the unimaginable worlds of space, then I am a solipsist."

"You have a name for everything," said Bhagawan Sri, "like our
_pandits_.  But a name does not give knowledge.  Beyond thinking and
imagination, there are subtler bodies which remain for ever outside
mortal sense.  Our Vedas said that, before your microscopes and
telescopes.  No one will ever see the world as it really is, even the
greatest _guru_.  _Samadhi_ is but a rending of one veil, when there
are seven.  It is an illusion, like everything else; like your
mathematics, which one day will prove to you that two and two do not
make four.  Such beliefs are useful illusions, necessary props.  But
_Sarvan Khalvidam Brahman_: outside Him not even solipsists exist."

"Some of our thinkers have already come to that conclusion," I replied,
"but their methods seem to me to be more elastic, perhaps, than yours.
They make all kinds of useful discoveries in the course of their
researches into the properties of matter, such as electric light, which
will surely make us all cleaner and wiser than we were.  Are not such
inventions more useful than centuries of inward-turning?"

"Your methods are good in their way," admitted the _guru_, "but you are
beglamoured by your achievements.  Sheikh Abdulla Ansar of Herat used
to tell his pupils, 'To fly in the air is no miracle, for the dirtiest
flies can do it, to cross rivers without bridge or boat is no miracle,
for a terrier can do the same; but to help suffering hearts is a
miracle performed by holy men.'  You can turn day into night by
electricity, but that does not give you more time to think.  You can
send messages over wires and so on, but such activities may be without
discrimination.  You have multiplied your bodies in enlarging your
national _karma_, and produced suffering in proportion to your
discoveries.  England is full of monstrous phallic signs.  You worship
your factory chimneys.  We also worship production, but knowing more of
what we do.  We worship it as the sign of renewal and as the Destroyer
of Ignorance.  We attend to the rajasic and tamasic[2] qualities of
man.  We deal with the three brains, the cerebral, abdominal and
pelvic.  We teach through the six principles of silence, listening,
remembering, understanding, judgment, action.  We consider the
individual as composed of the five qualities of _akasha, vaya, agni,
apas_ and _prithivi_[3] and give him knowledge according to his needs,
studying his subtlety, voice-pitch, vibrations, motions, respirations,
smell and conversation.  We study sound emanating from three places,
the perinaeum, the cardiac plexus and the mouth.  All that exists is
Sound in various shapes, but its highest vibration, the stillness of
_samadhi_,[4] is only reached through _yama-niyamma, asana, mudra,
pranayama, dharana, dhyana_.[5]  By an illusory attribution of
importance to these steps, followed by their withdrawal, as your
mathematicians sometimes reason from a formula that is nothing but an
abstraction and contrary to practical experience, we rise into
God-consciousness.  Then we knock the scaffolding away."

There was a twinkle in Bhagawan Sri's eyes.  My impression was that he
was talking to amuse himself.

"How, definitely," I said, "would you advise me to start learning Yoga?
Could I, for instance, begin by learning something about
breath-control?"

"_Pranayama_ would be more dangerous for you than polo, Sahib, for it
cannot be performed without purification and prayer.  The sleeping
snake must not raise her head before her time."

Somewhere or other I had read that Yoga began with the internal purity,
so I said that I was well aware of the necessity for making clean the
inside as well as the outside of the cup and the platter.

Bhagawan Sri seemed pleased at my discernment, or glad to change the
subject.

"You are right," he said, "my pupils wash everything, even their
brains.  _Mens sana in corpore sano_ is a tag I was always using when I
was a Headmaster.  But you eat meat and indulge in an unnatural amount
of exercise.  The way will be long for you.  Great forces are astir in
the world, and you are living amongst these powers.  They must work out
their _karma_, even as you must work out yours, and we, ours."

Bhagawan Sri's pupils had returned for their evening lesson and were
standing by the river steps, waiting to be called.  Doves fluttered
down from the palace ledges and flirted and bickered on the raft; a
sacred bull stumbled down the steps and nosed the _guru_, as if
wondering whether he was edible; and a fox terrier bitch appeared,
brought by one of the pupils, wagging her tail and frisking round us.

"If I became a Yogi could I keep a dog?" I asked.

"Of course.  Why not?  She bathes with me every morning."

"In the holy Ganges?"

"The Mother washes her as she washes me.  The Ganges loves all our
India, rich and poor, man and beast.  There is nothing she cannot
purify.  We give to her the bodies of our dead and we drink her waters.
That surprises you, but even your test-tubes tell you that we are
right, for if you analyse the Ganges water you will find that it is
pure."

"That is because it runs over such wide stretches of sand and beneath
so much sunlight, _guru-ji_.  But I do not question your views," I
hastened to add, "I only ask to learn them."

"Your feet have been led to the path.  You have come here, and you will
come again.  To me, or to another, if I am dead.  For you may not
return for a long time."

Bhagawan Sri held out his hand.

I took it and rose, feeling that I might have overstayed my welcome.
He held my hand in both his, looking through me, rather than at me.

"Books will not show you Yoga," he said, "but life.  You must live out
your time as a soldier.  I cannot tell when you will be ready for the
path, but I know that you are not ready now, and that you will have to
suffer more.  I shall be sitting here under my umbrella for some years
still."

"It is a privilege, _guru-ji_, to know that I may return.  Already I
feel something of your peace."

"When your breathing is equable," he answered, "you will have peace of
mind whether you are being jostled in the market place, or are sitting
alone on a black antelope-skin.  May you travel the royal path and
drink the fountain of its ending."


Benares was hung with mist when I left Bhagawan Sri, and the melon beds
on the far side of the Ganges had grown dark.  Down-river, a train was
puffing over the red girder railway-bridge that my race has built in
this city of abstractions.

Was all this talk of the Brahmins--the doubt rose in my mind like the
tortoise I had seen in the Jumna--a screen to shield them from modern
life?  Or had they in truth a knowledge as dynamic as steam and steel?

A gong struck close to me, in contemptuous answer to my thought.

Men and women were surging into a temple doorway, an oil cresset
fluttering over their glistening bodies.  Inside, a throng pressed
their foreheads to the floor, venerating the symbol of Siva, that had
been anointed with rice and milk.

I looked back to the river, now empty of boats and streaked with
reflected stars.  Men and women were still praying on the steps of the
Dasaswamadh Ghat and meditating there, for the Ganges is never without
her worshippers.  She greets them at dawn, attends them through the
day, hears their vespers when she is crowned with stars, serene, aloof,
apparently eternal.

A sacerdotal courtesan leant against the temple door, in profile to me,
looking towards the river.  Her nose tip-tilted, her upper lip lightly
shadowed, her underlip a trifle projecting, her small breasts bold
under her striped _sari_.

The _devadasi_ and the Ganges: between them they received the outer
worship of Benares.  Other gods there were in stone and brass; but
those were dead, these the quick and adored priestesses.

Our railway-bridge and the minarets of the mosque of Aurungzeb
dominated the city in a physical sense.  But Christ and Mahomed had not
prevailed; and at Buddha Gaya, near by, where the Enlightened One first
turned the Wheel of the Law two and a half millenniums ago, stood the
ruined shrine of what was now a great foreign religion.  Creeds and
conquerors had left Hinduism untouched.

The _devadasi_ glanced in my direction, and I drew nearer, looking into
her so subtle and so carnal eyes.  I expected--comprehension perhaps.
But a conch bugled, and she turned her back on me, leaving me very much
alone.



[1] The _guru_ meant _samadhi_ by the path of Bhakti Yog.

[2] Practical and earthly.

[3] Roughly: ether, air, fire, water, earth.

[4] Bliss.

[5] Right emotions, postures, gestures, breath-control, sense-control,
mind-control and meditation.




CHAPTER X

DEATH OF THE DEVIL

In the little world containing recruits to drill, ponies to ride, balls
and targets to hit, papers to sign, Benares and its problems were soon
overlaid by regimental duties, although not forgotten.  One night when
I was in the office late, struggling with secret mobilisation papers
which I had to hand over to the officer replacing me before I went
Home, the Woordie Major arrived to see me, all hot and bothered.

Two crimes of an unusual sort had occurred, on which my advice was
necessary.  I had hoped to finish my work in time to catch the midnight
train to Richa Road, for a last pigsticking meet at Ratmugri.  But now
I put my files away.  One must be a patient listener if one would be an
Adjutant of Bengal Lancers.

A pay sowar, the Woordie Major told me, had announced his intention of
becoming a Christian.  What was to be done with him?  Obviously, said
the Woordie Major, he could not stay in the regiment.  We were
Muhammedans.  A clerk could be a Hindu and join other gods to God as
much as he pleased, but not a combatant of the 17th Cavalry.  Could I
not reason with this misguided youth about his idolatrous desires?
(Else he might get his throat cut, he added.)

No, I could not reason with him, I answered firmly.  But it was
desirable that he should go away and think over his conversion in a
calmer atmosphere.  Why not send him to the Regimental Farm by the
night train?  Extra clerks were needed at the Farm, and it was a
thousand miles away.  I scribbled a note to the apostate's Squadron
Commander, explaining his sudden removal.  A Christian, indeed!

The other difficulty had been caused by a spectre which appeared at the
new ammunition guard.  It had come at midnight, last night, and it had
said to the sentry: "If you don't go away, I will come again with seven
brothers bigger than myself, and kill you all."  Whereupon the sentry
went mad.  He was Ghulam Haider, a plump Punjaubi whom I knew well, for
he had recently been a recruit.

In what language, I asked, had it uttered its threat?  Punjaubi, said
the Woordie Major.

All day Ghulam Haider's friends had been holding him down to prevent
him killing himself, or running amok.  He had had several fits, and was
growing worse.  The Hospital Assistant could do nothing.

I sent for my bicycle.

First I went to the guard, and doubled it.  Two sentries would
certainly keep the ghost at bay.

Then to the hospital.  Ghulam Haider turned the sightless white of his
eyes in my direction, and gibbered.  When I touched his forehead, he
yelled and threw himself on the floor in spite of the six sweating
Punjaubis who were attending him.

Was it epilepsy?  Why had the doctor not been sent for?  As the
Hospital Assistant did not answer, and seemed to have something on his
mind, I took him aside and questioned him as to what was biting Ghulam
Haider.

"He has seen something, Sahib," he replied--"but when the Doctor puts
him in a straight waistcoat to-morrow, he will forget what he saw."

"We can do nothing?"

"What can we do?  The world is full of illusions."

Yes; and I now remembered that the ammunition guard had been mounted
for the first time only a week ago, when a sowar stole some
nitro-glycerine from it in order to dynamite fish in a near-by stream.
He was court-martialled and sentenced to imprisonment, but the finding
of the Court was quashed because the ammunition had been left without
proper supervision.  So now the regiment had to find an extra guard,
which was a nuisance to all concerned, and Ghulam Haider must have
heard talk of this.

He was struggling like a man possessed, and screaming as if something
was being torn inside him.  Devils were working his muscles and using
his lungs.  But it was not in my power to drive them out, and Naim Shah
was waiting outside the hospital with my dog-cart, to take me to the
station.


Riding out to Ratmugri Bagh in the small hours of the morning, lulled
by the steady swing of the camel and exalted by the close stars, I
wondered what kind of Christ the pay-sowar had seen: had it been the
God of the Sahibs, or the Mahdi of Islam, or some avatar of the Hindus?
And what was Ghulam Haider's ghost?  Could it be that through him the
unspoken wishes of six hundred men were foaming out of one mouth?  Gods
and devils were close to us in this climate.

We were all a little mad in India, a little touched by a sun that
over-ripens men's thoughts.  My pursuit of philosophy and pigs, for
instance, was apparently illogical.  Either I should devote myself to
_ahimsa_, or else forget Benares and be a Bengal Lancer.

Yet reconcile these things I must, for I had need of both.  Yoga was
sound at core: its worships were those of a sane dawn, compared to the
stuffy subtleties of the formalised religions of the West.

So with pigsticking: it sweated the false civilisation out of me.

Besides, the difference between spearing a boar and munching a lettuce
leaf is essentially one of degree, not kind.  An ox is big and bellows
when slaughtered: a mosquito merely stops its buzzing.  The mosquito
wanted to feed on us, we on the ox.  Who shall say that God intended
the one and not the other, or that we may choose which of His creation
we kill or cage or assimilate?  Every breath a man takes proclaims that
life lives on other lives.  We are all killers.  Perhaps Nature
represents the power of evil.  If so, what a beautiful devil she can be!

As I swung along on my elastic-footed _untni_, the roses of morning
gathered between the stars.  It was that serene instant when day and
dark are balanced.

No dawn is so swift and solemn as that on the plains of India.  Other
mornings may be tenderer, more mysterious, but none compare with these
huge sunrises in rhythm.  The dark plains stir, and wake, and grow
radiant with promise: colours are massed and marshalled across the wide
heavens, then swiftly, smoothly, light comes over the sleeping world.
The rite is over and the miracle accomplished.

Surya reigned, and with his first rays I saw a big boar not two hundred
yards away, following along the tow-path of the Kundra Canal.

Spurring my camel and whacking her neck, I galloped into camp, and as
she folded herself up by the breakfast table, I shouted the news to the
coffee-drinkers.  The Devil was ready saddled: I returned on him to
show the way.

The boar had dodged into a patch of arrah; as he tried to slink out
unobserved, he was viewed by a peasant, and chased into another crop,
where we lost him.  Six of us had arrived by now.  We rode back and
forth, beating the cover with our spears.


At last the boar breaks again, taking us over the road-menders' pits,
and across the canal: ahead lies a branch of the Ganges.  The Devil
slithers down a sand-bank and plunges with a snort of joy into the
water.  None of the others will face it: there's an ungentlemanly
pleasure in that.

This boar is a very good swimmer.  So is The Devil.  I leave his head
free, holding the cantle of the saddle and my spear in my right hand,
and paddling with my legs and left arm.  How delicious this cold water
feels, through my clothes, down into my boots.  With a squelch I am in
saddle again, everything running and dripping.  That's a stone handicap
to our friend, but I'll catch him yet.

He's making for the _jhow_ along the river-bank.  Blind going, and I'm
alone.

The Collector has crossed, but he's far behind.  A long rein and easy
seat--The Devil must stand up without my help.  I can see nothing in
this sea of _jhow_ except the ridge of the boar's back.  There's no
skill in riding such a country: nothing avails but a good horse, and
good luck.

I have no luck.  Just as we clear the _jhow_, and I am gaining, green
branches and white sand hit me in the face.  The Devil has caught his
foot in a twisted root and fallen, but I have the reins.  I'm out of
the hunt.  My fingers are a nasty yellow colour with the cold water.  I
wish I'd had some sleep and breakfast.  The Collector is on the boar
now, and another spear is riding wide, expecting a jink.  The boar is
winded.  He'll charge.  Yes, but the Collector's missed him.

I'll have one more ride on The Devil.  Whoa, lad.  That's better.  I've
soused down into the saddle, gathered the wet reins, and am off again.
After this ride, it will be nine months before I feel the lift of his
loins, and the snatch of his bridle as he judges the approach to a
ditch.  I need a rest.  Indian earth is hard to fall on.  I have
swallowed much of it, too, and my loins ache.  Am I growing old?

No, by God not yet!  The boar's jinked again, away from the other spear
and (oh, exultation incomparable!) towards me.

The Devil has the legs of the others, and of the boar.  Steadily we
draw nearer.  There is no cover here, and the boar is blown.

We draw level.  The boar's mouth is open--in another two lengths those
big tusks of his will furrow the sand.  He's charged.  He's come up my
spear.  I can feel his breath on my hand.  I've killed, I think, but
why doesn't The Devil go on?

Why _doesn't_ The Devil go on?

This riding, and fall, and riding again seems to have happened ages
ago, but we are still on the same spot.  The boar charged.  I dropped
my spear, didn't I?  Still The Devil is anchored, going up and down
like a hobby horse.

My poor Devil--why didn't I guess?  When the boar turned over, a foot
of spear entered your belly by the girth.  Poor Devil.

Isn't that better now I'm off your back?  You are not dying, my friend?


The Devil's forelegs were straddled and his proud head was sunk between
them.  He shook himself and lay down.  He stretched himself out, as if
he knew that the day's work was over.  I staunched his wound with my
handkerchief: immediately it became a sop of blood.  He gave a little
whinny, as if I had brought him corn.

Then his eyes glazed.

A stimulant might have saved him, if only Lashkman Piari with her
medicine chest had been visible.  The life was still there in him, but
dammed up somehow in the sensitive nerves, so that the heart would not
beat.

I waited by him, helpless.  Kites circled above us.  They knew.  His
life had gone out of my reach, leaving carrion where fleetness and fire
had been an instant before.  It was the suddenness of it that was
horrible; the knowledge that the ripple of his muscles and the swish of
his tail and the pride of his eyes and the sweep of his stride were
still close to me, although separated from reality by the time-lag of a
nervous reflex.  I sat still, not smoking, not thinking, growing
gradually stony-hearted.  Twilight came, and at last the elephants.  We
hoisted The Devil on to Lashkman Piari's pad.  Flies followed us back
to camp.


I had no heart to continue pigsticking.  There was a train back to
Bareilly at mid-day.

Before mounting my camel, I asked that one of The Devil's hoofs should
be cut off for me to keep (I am dipping my pen in it now) and that his
body should be burned and scattered in the Ganges.  Then, with the wail
of his syce sounding in my ears I rode away from that good life for
ever.  After a few hours of jolted stupor in the train, I was back in
the familiar round of cantonments.




CHAPTER XI

BEAUTY AND BOREDOM

In late May of this year, I was with my parents in a Castello on the
Italian Riviera--and for the next five years my life was so far from
its previous channels that I might have been on another earth.

Sometimes I heard from Bareilly, and learned of the remote happenings
in the regiment.

The pay-sowar, I heard, had never intended to become a Christian at
all, but had been a follower of a false Mahdi who lived in Quadian in
the Punjaub.  Since my departure, he had announced his readiness to
confess to the faith of his fathers, and had duly repeated the
_qualimah_[1] before the assembled Indian officers in the regimental
mosque.

As to Ghulam Haider, who had been put in a strait-waistcoat as the
Hospital Assistant had predicted, his return to sanity had been speedy.
He had been passed fit for duty long before I had left Bareilly and I
had ordered that a quart of goat's milk should be given to him daily,
to fortify him against spectres.  I now heard from the Woordie Major
that he was becoming too fat for a cavalryman.

Brownstone and Daisy were doing well, as also were Maidstone,
Tombstone, Judy, Jack, Whetstone, and the other puppies.  To-day, their
descendants encircle the Empire, but Brownstone and Daisy I never saw
again, for they died before the end of the Great War.  When I had
patted them good-bye, I did not know for what far journeys we were all
of us destined.

I heard also that Monarch, my young black Arab who was shaping to be
one of the fastest ponies in India, had been bitten by a _krait_[2]
while grazing, and was dead....  Yet here by the sapphire
Mediterranean, Siva was incredible.

When the German Emperor entered the little blue bay of Portofino in the
_Hohenzollern_, I dipped the Union Jack to him and watched his
answering salute.  He made a fine Imperial figure on his bridge,
dressed in all the stars and orders of an Admiral, with the sunlight
glinting on braid and jewels, and the withered arm well hidden.  The
fishermen of Portofino and I were much impressed.  There was peace over
that enchanted land and sea.

There was peace throughout that radiant May and June while I basked on
the rocks, or lay in the bottom of my cat-boat, listening to her
chuckling progress in a light breeze.  And in London, in July, if there
was not exactly peace, there was such a faade of pomp and pleasure
that the war-clouds in Ulster and the Balkans loomed only slightly
larger to me than the Hunt Cup and the Eton and Harrow match.

How old I feel when I think of the opera, Ascot, Henley, Lord's, all
the fashions and frivolities of 1914!  When I had first left England,
bicycling had only recently gone out of fashion.  Now had arrived the
era of motors which often ran for hundreds of miles without a
breakdown; and aeroplanes which looped the loop.  We seemed to be
evolving towards a splendid Golden Age.  In 1914, hostesses kept lists
of young men of respectable antecedents whom they asked to their
parties, and there was no limit to the number of invitations received
by those whose names were on this register, provided they also had a
healthy appetite for pleasure.  I had, and was rarely in bed before
dawn.

In that comfortable and well-ordered world, I took my small, but
comfortable and well-ordered place.  Future generations will envy mine,
that has seen the rise of skirts from ankle to knee, and now their
descent, with all that that implies.  I feel that I am linked with the
centuries in a way impossible to those born in this thin-faced, anxious
age.

"It was great fun," I scribbled in a letter I wrote that summer.  "On
Monday I went to 'The Duke of Killiecrankie' with A's party, and then
to a dance at Claridge's.  On Tuesday to dine with A., and a dance at
the Ritz.  On Wednesday to dine with someone I don't know (introduced
by someone I forget) and on to a dance.  While there, Lady H. asked me
to come on to the Centenary Ball, and with true American kindness she
sent two tickets and two fancy dresses.  So I went on with a friend to
the Albert Hall.  Such a sight.  Lady Maud Warrender looked magnificent
as Britannia, and when a suffragette came on to the dais and tried to
make a scene, she only moved a little to one side to allow her to be
removed.  To-morrow I go to N. for Saturday to Monday.  Next week I
have to put on full dress uniform to bow at St. James's.  There's great
excitement over the Curragh business: no doubt Carson and F. E. Smith
mean business, and some of the Navy will come over to our side.  Then
there'll be the deuce to pay."

Suffragettes and suppers, house-parties, a levee....  These things were
blotted out of my mind by this friend with whom I went to the Albert
Hall for the ball that celebrated a hundred years of peace between
England and America.

She altered my view of life so profoundly that I never mentioned the
change to anyone.

Yet to-day I cannot recall the details, except that she was dark and
slight, and wore roses.  We began to dance as soon as we were
introduced, and went on for hours.  Presently we were alone, at supper
at a near-by hotel.  All that I can remember is that her face flashed
up in welcome out of a sea of faces, and was then lost to me in the
storm that broke over the world.  Except for this my mind is so blank
about her that I suspect it of hiding something.


At the house in which I was staying in Ireland, a telegram arrived
warning me to be ready to rejoin my regiment in India.  Presently
another telegram came, ordering me to a Cavalry Depot near Aldershot.

I went there in haste, hoping I was not too late to see the end of the
War, and found "Kitchener's Kids" were pouring into barracks by the
hundred.  We had no saddles, but plenty of nice horses.  The wounded
from Mons had sad stories to tell.

The War was not over by September of that first year, and in September
I landed in France, full of "cavalry spirit," and carrying with me one
of the new thrusting swords, with which I hoped to transfix numerous
Germans.  A man, they said, died more easily than a pig.

"Here I am in a caf in Havre," I wrote (then heavily deleted the word
Havre), "drinking caf-au-lait.  I hope to catch the express to Paris,
but may have to go in a troop train.  The London Scottish came with me
in the _City of Chester_.  They are the finest lot of men I have ever
seen in my life."

"The officers of the regiment I am with," I continued later, from the
Aisne, "--never changed their clothes for three weeks during the
retreat.  We are billeted in a charming old farmhouse, resting.  The
country all round is beautiful.  The guns continue without
intermission, and lorry-loads of wounded prisoners pass.  I am glad to
be here, for we are sure to have lots of cavalry work.  I rode out
yesterday to see the battle.  So far it has been in progress eight
days.  You can't think how interesting it all is.  Please send me a
pair of socks and some handkerchiefs every week."

Interesting.  Lots of cavalry work.  Socks.  That is what I wrote.

We slept in our clothes, ready for a summons to lead the van of the
pursuit; lived on bully-beef, drank rum in our tea, read the English
papers to hear how the War was going, re-organised, re-equipped.  At
dusk, each night, I climbed up to a plateau overlooking the Aisne, and
watched and wondered....

This was the war for which I had been trained, and for which I had
trained my men, now thousands of miles away.  A friend of mine (a
Bengal Lancer) had killed two men in a charge during the retreat, and
had been given a brevet Majority and a Croix-de-Guerre.  Lucky devil.
Here we hid our horses away.  We gossiped and groused.  Aeroplanes
droned over us.

The battle was being fought in a tangle of little trenches, towards
which I was not allowed to approach.  When I attempted to do so, I
encountered snubs and red-hatted Majors.  "Soon the Allies will be
again in full pursuit of a beaten enemy" ran a manifesto of Sir John
French.  As the days passed, we grew doubtful.

French reservists trailed into Soissons.  "White mice" we called them,
because they were small and humble.  In the town square, rode Frenchmen
of another type: brass-bellied troopers with horse-hair plumes in their
helmets.  The Cuirassiers sat splendidly on their horses, watching the
white mice.  We watched each other.  Did anyone know what was
happening?  I was getting indigestion, that was certain.

Now in this part of France the cooking is the best in the world.  It
was absurd to be eating our rations when we might get a country girl to
make us soup.  I rode round; seeking what we might devour.  But neither
eggs nor milk nor chickens were obtainable.  "_Les Allemands out tout
pris--tout--tout!_"

The guns never paused.  One night, alone in my field, I wept over the
world.  Heavy black clouds were massing upon the Aisne heights.  Over
there machine-guns chattered and chattered and chattered like the
delirium of a giant hashish-smoker.  All over Europe women wept, and
the harvest lay unreaped.  I wanted to scream, and coughed and cried
into my handkerchief, much ashamed of myself.  Was this lack of
exercise, or too much bully-beef?

At last the suspense came to an end, and we rode northwards in great
good spirits, for our division was apparently engaged in a flanking
movement to take the Germans in rear.  The weather was superb--and
French girls were kind....

"They give us fruit, wine, flowers, everything except cigarettes.  I'm
frightfully hungry in the mornings.  To-day I breakfasted on a stick of
chocolate, a cup of black coffee, a jug of caf-au-lait, an apple and a
pear, some pt de dindon, a glass of wine and finally a cup of
chocolate, all taken from the saddle.  The marches are delightful as
soon as the sun comes out.  We get up in the dark, however, and it's
cold then.  Yesterday I had my first bath for a fortnight (in a pig
trough).  Beds are usually clean, but washing arrangements primitive.
I have 'made' a good-looking German mare in a French farmhouse, where
she was abandoned by the Allemands.  I gave the farmer a receipt for
her.  She ought to be worth 100 after the show is over.  A friend has
just told me that an old lady in his last night's billet presented his
regiment with a 50 h.p. limousine car.  She wanted to give them
another, but they had to refuse, as they only had one man to drive it.
Every regiment keeps a car if it can--unofficially, of course.  I want
another pair of leather gloves, please, and a Jaeger cap to pull down
over my ears.  Also matches and cigarettes, as these can't be had for
love or money."

I enjoyed myself until the day when we shelled the Mont des Cats, near
Hazebrouck.  In the evening, we bivouacked in the Trappist monastery on
its summit.  Our losses had been two officers and four men, but we had
killed the same number of Germans.  Our dead were laid out in a row.

My Bengal Lancer friend was one; he lay there on the dirty straw, grey
and limp, with a parson mumbling over him.  I stood dazed, for he was a
hero, and I could not believe that heroes ended like this.

During the night, my eyes would not shut, as if to make up for the days
that they had been as blind as a puppy's.

We rode into Belgium next day and were greeted by the populace at
Reninghelst with a barrel of beer.  From there, I was sent forward from
Messines with a patrol, to discover how far the retreating Germans had
gone.  Speed was vital.  As I clattered along over the cobbles with my
men, making noise enough to wake the dead, and expecting to run into a
German rear-guard at any moment, I became very clearly aware of the
fact that, "cavalry spirit" or no cavalry spirit, I did not want to die.

Here we were on the outskirts of Warneton.  I had only to push on with
sufficient bravery in order to meet an ambush.  Some of my men would
doubtless succeed in returning with the news that General Gough
required, and one subaltern more or less didn't matter.  But it
mattered to me.

Stopping in front of a shuttered house, I roused the inhabitants,
cross-questioned them, rode on cautiously, repeated the process, found
the swollen corpse of a Uhlan.  Gradually, we worked our way up to the
crossing of the Deule, and halted there for a stirrup-cup.  The
innkeeper came out unwillingly, but when he discovered that we were
friends, and that I spoke French, he told me that the Germans were
holding the opposite bank of the river.  That was what I wanted to
know.  Several citizens confirmed his statement.  I had just scribbled
a message to Headquarters and sent it back at the gallop, when a
violent fusillade broke out on my right and left.  Both the other
patrols had run into live, angry, invisible Germans.  A loose horse
galloped by, striking sparks on the stones.  We caught it and trotted
slowly back to Messines.  For twenty-four hours we had been in touch
with the enemy, but had only seen one, who smelt very badly, and seemed
to me a good epitome of all this business.

I wrote out a full report, then lay dozing with my squadron in the
market square.  Presently word came that the General was pleased with
our work.  Well, if he was pleased, I was not, but I had at any rate
learned a lesson not in the training manuals.  I had grown much older
and wiser in the last forty-eight hours.

All day I dozed.  A spy was arrested in the square and collapsed in the
gutter.  Someone said: "He'll be shot at dawn if he doesn't die of funk
before."  Again I went to sleep.  When I woke, I found a nun asking the
men whether they thought that the girls at the Institution Royale would
be raped if we retreated.  I assured her that we were advancing, so
that the question could not arise, and that anyway the War would be
over by the spring.

But spring was a long way off.  This was November.

We attacked a farm south of Messines, then retreated.  We dug shallow
trenches and left them.  We cursed the plum jam.  Our feet swelled with
the sudden cold.  Some of the men could hardly walk, but no one went
sick.  We became lousy.  Lorry-loads and bus-loads of infantry kept
streaming into the market square: cannon-fodder we said, and they were.
It rained always.  No one knew just where the enemy was, nor even,
sometimes, which way we faced.  Sometimes I was so sleepy that I wished
that a bullet would let me go on lying down.

Then came a rumour.  An Indian Cavalry Division was sailing for the
front, and reinforcements of infantry.  The more I thought over this
prospect, the pleasanter it seemed, for the 17th Cavalry, who had been
complimented on their military efficiency by every Inspector of Cavalry
for the last five years, might well be chosen for service abroad.

My hopes came true, and I was ordered to report myself immediately to
the Disembarkation Commandant at Marseilles, in order to take over the
advance party of my regiment, which was due to arrive in France within
a few days.

On my gay way through Paris, I bought a motor car for the mess, and
arranged for four excellent interpreters and a marvellous chef.  We
would seek death or glory with the best advice, and on full stomachs.

De-loused and shining-booted and a month-old veteran of the Great War,
I sauntered down the quays of Marseilles to report myself to the
authorities.

Here the blow fell.

"Your regiment?  Didn't you know that you had a case of glanders at
Bombay?" said a Staff Officer.  "The 17th Cavalry isn't coming.  I'm
afraid we've nothing for you."


I shall pass over the next few weeks quickly--indeed the next few
years--for when one is stunned one is not articulate, even in
retrospect.  And I remained orphaned, lost, rudderless for the
remainder of the War, except for a few happy months in Mesopotamia.

Here I was alone and unwanted on the streets of Marseilles.  The four
wonderful interpreters would go to other regiments, the car would be
re-sold, the cook waste his rum babas in the wilderness.  Over a glass
of light port in the Bodega, I considered the situation gloomily.  I
had nowhere to go.  One place was like another to Sivanand at Agra, but
that was small consolation to me in France.

Unpleasant as the fighting was, however, it could hardly be drearier
than the line of communications.  In the Royal Flying Corps I had heard
that there was adventure to be had without undue discomfort, so I
decided to apply to be trained as a pilot, and to fill in the time
meanwhile by becoming an interpreter to one of the Indian Cavalry
regiments already in Europe.


Orleans was under snow when I arrived there as a French-English
interpreter with the Indian contingent.  We moved up the line with
chilblains and coughs, and found Flanders under a sheet of white, with
white trees against a pale blue sky.  It was a beautiful, crisp
Christmas.

Early in 1915 the weather changed.  On a rainy afternoon a motor
bicyclist came with orders from Brigade Headquarters and was away again
in a flash.  The news he brought spread from mouth to mouth.

The good lady who looked after my squadron insisted on preparing an
early dinner for us, consisting of soup, cutlets, haricots.

"You do not know when you may eat again," she said.  "Ah, _mon petit
Fanou_," she added to her pug, from whose nose I had been accustomed to
induce electric sparks by rubbing him in front of the stove on frosty
nights, "it is better to keep warm by the fire, you think, than to
fight for France.  _Hein?_"

Her only son was a very young _marchal de logis_, whose photograph
stood over the mantelpiece.  When I rode that way again a month later,
I heard from a villager that the boy had been wounded somewhere in
Alsace and that she had left hurriedly, hoping to see him, but that it
had been too late, and that he was _mort pour la patrie_, and that
Fanou had caught a chill and died also.  I could not bring myself to
face her, as I should have done.

We formed up on the Bethune road in the drizzling dark, our turbans
heavy with the wet, and the men holding their lances in corpse-like
hands.  Our feet were frozen, too.  Gulped cutlets lay heavy on my
stomach; the hard-mouthed brute I rode kept stumbling.  It was a most
unpleasant march.

We walked on and on very slowly through the raw night, with star-shells
going up in the middle distance and the voices of the guns growing
louder.  Ammunition dumps, camps, bivouacs, a mile of buses loomed up
on the outskirts of Bethune.  In the town we halted for a long time,
picketed, moved again, picketed, yawned away to sit in a caf, and then
at dawn paraded once more, this time without our horses.

At last we were to see the Germans.  Day broke as we formed single file
to enter the communication trench.  On and on we trudged, through deep
mud, past coils of wire, field kitchens, field hospitals, gnomes with
scrawny beards who were Royal Engineers before they took to the
trenches.  For an hour we plodded and twisted, then halted in a deep
ditch.  Bullets splashed between our loopholes, and sometimes through
them.

We were in the marshes of Festubert, with the Germans eighty yards away.

In the trenches we smoked our pipes and drank our rum.  Our men knew
nothing about this Western quarrel, but it didn't seem very dangerous
at first, and they preferred being active in a wet trench to lying
night after night in a barn, in the verminous dark.  As we neither
attacked nor were attacked, our only discomforts were the wet and cold,
neither of which were intolerable.  Sniping and snipers kept us amused:
the men were like children learning a new game.

A noise like a toy dog's bark came from a man in my section.  On
opening his shirt, only a small hole was discernible.  Yet his lungs
had been sucked out at the back of his tunic, and he was, of course,
dead.  We carried him back to the latrine trench, which was the only
convenient place to put him at the moment, and here my foot sank in a
soft place, and levered up a small brown leg, with toes splayed out.
The Gurkhas had been there before us.

When night fell, I visited the dressing-station with a couple of
wounded.  Near the doctor's table, with all its ugly sights, was a
ruined shrine in which stood a statue of the Virgin.  Someone had
written out these lines from Kipling and placed them at Her feet:

  _Mary, born of woman,
  Remember, reach and save
  The soul that goes to-morrow
  Before the God who gave._

  _Cloak Thou our undeserving,
  Make firm the shuddering breath
  In silence and unswerving
  To meet Thy lesser death._


Who had thought of doing this, I wondered?  The verses belonged to
another age.

The majority of us, of course, hoped for comfortable Blighty wounds.
That was human.  What was divine, was the bearing of those few whose
souls rose above the battle and gave of their strength to others, so
that bravery ran through the ranks like an electric current.  All of us
in the war saw such men, and the moments they inspired.  For the sake
of that, the rest was worth while.


Had I been killed during this time, it would have been only because I
feared to be out of a fashion.  Instead, I succumbed ingloriously to a
fever.  One doctor at Wimereux said it was appendicitis, another,
bronchitis.  Whatever it was, my temperature went down in a few weeks
and I then became the willing prey of nurses in Mayfair.  As soon as I
could stand, I tottered to the Air Ministry.

A month or two later I was convalescent, and found myself strolling
from Winchester back to my house at Twyford, across the lovely lawns of
St. Cross and along the gurgling, glutted Itchen.

Spring had come at last.  Those poor nuns at Messines would be having a
hell of a time.  We were luckier in England.  And I became aware
suddenly--as if a star-shell had glittered over my thoughts--of what
the War meant to me.  It was not a war for civilisation (which had
twisted my mind out of shape) but for England.  My veins were proud
that they carried English blood and that they were part of a stream
greater than all present lives.  I saw the careful fields, the opal
distances, the lovely haze upon this land; its sleek cattle, its sheep
thick-nibbling the pastures, its rich content and strength.  The
physical sources of my being were revealed.  I was nearly thirty, and
learning to love my country.

Smile, reader, if you will.  Your life may have always been passed in
green places.  Unless you have lived abroad you will have missed the
comparisons that a returned wanderer may make; as for me, I do not care
how many may have expressed the same thoughts better; nor would I
exchange the memory of that afternoon for any other in my life.

It was raining.  I looked down the churchyard of Twyford to the river,
and across to the fields, and I thought of the energies that had gone
into that soil to make it a garden, and of the blood that had been
spent to keep it so.  I was English, grown like the corn like the
grass, like the yew under which I sat, but not so useful or so ancient
as the yew.  England came to me like a goddess then, and I have held
fast to her ever since, in a world where so much is so very uncertain.



[1] The creed of Islam.

[2] Bungarus cruleus, a poisonous steel-blue snake.




CHAPTER XII

IN THE AIR

Outward bound, on the Red Sea, I looked across a little stretch of
water, to where the hills of Arabia cut into the middle distance, and
melted away into the retractant ranges of the horizon, nebulous and
half-guessed.  Flying-fish came up to play about us; a shark showed its
white belly, scavenging for tit-bits; jellyfish evaded us placidly,
past our quivering side came creamy little patches of foam, and streaky
patches, and hyaline patches that bubbled delightfully.  I would have
been content enough to be gliding on these agate waters, if only I had
been going back to the front, instead of having been ordered to return
to the 17th Cavalry, now a mere training depot in Allahabad.

I had not been at all the kind of man who was wanted in the Royal
Flying Corps, apparently.  Its doctors had tapped and tested me with an
air of disapproval, and said nothing.  Then my orders for India had
arrived.

Over there in the glare, Arabs and Turks were fighting.  From Damascus
to Erzeroum, and from Beyrout to Basra, there were raids, marches,
counter-marches, and insurrections.  But I was being sent far from the
great quarrel, to vegetate amongst recruits and young horses.

Sir Mark Sykes, who was a passenger on board, had been explaining the
War to me.  Turkey would be dismembered, he said.  The Arabs were to
have a kingdom; the Russians, Constantinople.  If we won at Suvla Bay,
where we were about to land a big force, the War would be over very
soon....  Would it?  I could not imagine peace in the East, now that
the train was set.  The life-breath of continents is longer than that
of men, perhaps none of us alive would see the end of this unrest.  But
my path would be far from the blazes and explosions....

I shut my eyes, for they were blinded with light, too much light.


But at Bombay, unbelievably, I learned that my destination was not
Allahabad, after all, but Basra.  I had been gazetted as an Observer of
the Flying Corps and was posted to the recently formed Mesopotamian
Flight.

Asking no more questions, lest this marvellous news should be
contradicted, I sewed the coveted wings of an airman on my breast, and
took ship for Basra, happy that I was still to be concerned with the
two greatest adventures of mankind: war and flying.

On disembarking in the city of Sinbad (after having puked through the
Persian Gulf monsoon so that the deeps within me were as stirred as the
deep without) I found a little bald-headed Brevet-Major of the Flying
Corps, who was expecting not me but some aeroplane engines.

Had I brought the new Gnomes, he asked?  Could I fly a Martinsyde
Scout?  How did they spot for artillery in France?  Could I work a
Goerz Graflex camera?

Well, I had had a Brownie for years, I answered cautiously.  I could
develop and print my own photographs.  As to the Gnomes (should I say
that they had been sea-sick?) I knew nothing about them.

"Why are you here?" asked Reilly, rather crossly.

"Because I've been sent."

"Haven't you got your ticket?  Damn it all, I asked for a Martinsyde
pilot and two mechanics and two Gnome engines--and all they send me is
an Observer!"

"I'm sorry.  D'you remember we were at Sandhurst together?"

"So we were.  Have you ever flown in Caudrons?"

Now I had never even seen an aeroplane at close quarters, but I
remembered someone saying over a cocktail in a chateau near Bethune
(where I had once spent an evening with the R.F.C.) that Caudrons were
disgusting buses, and that they threw oil all over the place.  I
repeated this observation.

"Especially in this climate," agreed my Flight Commander, patting his
polished head.  "I don't quite know what we'll do with you," he added.
"It's a disappointment.  I suppose you can spot for the heavy batteries
in the Farman Shorthorn?"

"Yes," I answered firmly.

"Good.  Two of us went west last week--forced landing amongst hostile
Arabs--so we do want another Observer."


This is the morning of my first flight.  Dust devils are swirling
through the date-palms.  The wind lifts sheets of sand off the Arab
graveyard bordering the aerodrome, and the temperature is well over
100 Fahrenheit in the shade.

Start the "prop"?  Certainly.

"Look out!  You'll get your head chopped off!"

Stupid!  I was trying to swing the propeller while standing underneath
it.  Here's a mechanic to help.  I'll watch the way he does it.

"Contact!"  A heave and splutter of the engine.  "Contact!"  The
Maurice Farman is popping on most of her valves, slowly, fast, faster,
now with a roar that rattles my teeth as I climb into the Observer's
seat behind the pilot.  What's this strap for?  To tie round me?  Well,
we're off.  Rumpety-bump.  The ground slips away.

We've left it.  We're sailing over the twisting Tigris.  There's a
cloud of yellow dust behind us.  The leaves of my note-book are trying
to tear themselves out in this wind.

Basra looks cool and beautiful amongst its green groves.  A filthy hole
it is on foot, but here the world is different.  There are the marshes
of Shaiba, where a battle has been fought: and up there, to the left of
the river, near the old Garden of Eden, is the place where two of us
had their throats cut by Arabs, the other day.

Revs, props, glides, pancakes, pockets, landing Ts, Longhorns,
Shorthorns, Gnomes, Le Rhones; all this talk is not impossible to learn
by careful attention to its context.  No one knows that I have never
flown, and that until yesterday I had not the foggiest idea about even
the theory of artillery observation from the air.  It is really quite
simple, however.  I am to fire red, blue and white Very lights to
indicate "short," "over" and "range."  The battery has strips of cloth
to indicate the direction of the target, and the orders of its
commander: thus L means "observe for line," X "observe for range," E
"repeat last signal."

Also I have made a list of everything required for the equipment of a
dark-room.  I have tested the Goerz Graflex.

I have learned the strength of Turkish battalions, brigades, divisions.
I have been instructed in how to allow for mirages, count camels,
distinguish between Arab and regular cavalry, calculate distance from
gun-flash.  Soldiering is far more interesting than I thought.

There's a cold wind blowing up my shorts.  We have left the layer of
hot lead that weighs on Basra.  It's glorious up here.  Has man ever
known such bliss?  "To fly in the air is nothing wonderful," my _guru_
said "for even the dirtiest flies can do it."  He was wrong.  The world
has found a new Yoga and will need new bodies before it can fulfil the
possibilities of its last and greatest triumph.

Where's my Very pistol?  It's hard to find anything in this gale.  The
battery has just fired.  That salvo fell short.  Here's the pistol.  A
red cartridge.  Simple.  Now a white, for they have the range.

Ouch!  That was a bump, I suppose.  I'll tell the pilot to circle to
the right, towards the Persian frontier, to see if he really does what
I tell him.

"Take O to R," I scribble in my note-book, and leaning forward, show it
him.

He nods, and banks round so giddily that my inside jumps like a shot
black-buck.

I am an Observer.  Ten minutes ago I was an ignorant earthworm, but as
Masefield says, "Life's an affair of instants, spun to years."  I am
lord now of another dimension; the air is my hope and my love.

Damn!  The battery fired again, while I was writing to the pilot, and
now we've swung round so that I can't see the result.  What is the
signal for "not observed"?  ... Best do nothing.

The battery has now laid out an F on the ground--not "fool," but "fresh
target."  Their shots have gone over: a blue light.  Now short: a red
light.  Now short again: another red light.  Now over: a blue light.
I've ripped a finger-nail on this foul pistol.  They have the range: a
white light.

My pilot is scribbling in his note-book.

"Lot of oil on our tail," he passes back.

Is there?  What happens if you put oil on a Longhorn's tail?

The pilot points downwards.  I shrug my shoulders: he shrugs his: in
this heat our engines are as temperamental as prima donnas.  Yes, we
may as well land before anything goes wrong.  In fact, the quicker the
better, for, being an Observer, I want to remain one until the next
battle.


I shall like Reilly, and my work also.  We live sensibly, without fuss
or ceremony, in shorts, shirt-sleeves and sand-shoes.  I have a good
Flight Commander, and by all accounts a good General.  "Alphonso," the
troops call Sir Charles Townshend.  He sings "The Spaniard who blighted
my Life" and is a judge of champagne and of the dancing of the Gaiety
chorus; also a master-strategist.  The men love him, and the Turks fear
him, for he is lucky and victorious.

We are steaming up the Tigris now, in a red-hot iron tug with a drunken
skipper.

We stick on sand-banks, are sniped by Arabs, drink a great deal of
beer, eat, sleep and talk more than usual.  The desert smells good at
night: its stars are so marvellous that there is madness in them.

"Jumbo" Fulton and I (Jumbo is the nineteen-year-old pilot with whom I
generally fly) share a stifling cabin.  We discuss bomb sights, and how
to cool the beer, and whether we shall take Baghdad, and what Sir Mark
Sykes said, straight from the horse's mouth.

Before we reach Baghdad, however, we must defeat twelve thousand Turks
who are entrenched in the marshes and canals guarding Kut.


Our tug anchors at Sunnayat, about fifteen miles from Kut, on the right
bank of the Tigris.  The photographic barge arrives next day, and for a
fortnight I am flying, sketching, photographing, developing, printing,
and pasting the result together into a pretty composite map--busier
with responsible work than I have ever been before in my thirty years
of life.  The temperature still touches three figures in the shade.
Sometimes I spoil a plate with my brow's sweat: sometimes our work does
not finish till midnight, but we are always up at dawn to fly.  Here at
Sunnayat ten thousand of us are under canvas, with a couple of
gun-boats, and half a dozen river steamers, and a dozen barges.  Kut is
twenty miles up-stream.  Five miles from it, nearer us, at Es-sinn, the
Turkish army is astride the Tigris, which here runs roughly west to
east.  Nur-ud-din's position is one of great strength.  His right rests
on a high irrigation cut, heavily entrenched and wired.  A ferry
connects this southern position with another system of trenches in the
Horse-Shoe Marsh, north of the river.  Then there are more trenches,
another big marsh (the Suwada) and finally another mile of trenches
more lightly fortified.  Along this line, from south to north,
Nur-ud-din is supposed to have five thousand regular and four thousand
irregular troops, and eighteen guns.  Another three thousand men are in
reserve, nearer Kut, and on the Tigris he has six steamers, three
launches, a dozen barges.  The country is as flat as a pancake, except
for the irrigation cuts and the marshes.

The Turks dig like moles.  A frontal attack would be fatal in this open
ground against such a difficult position.

Alphonso is full of confidence, however.  He has telegraphed to Basra
in his flippant way, to say that now that Nur-ud-din is within punching
distance, he'll put him out for the count.  We have pitched camp on the
right bank of the river at Sunnayat, in order to make Nur-ud-din think
that we mean to attack on that side, and we shall make a demonstration
there, on the day before the battle.  Then we shall march our whole
force (or nearly all of it) across the river by night, and fall upon
the Turkish left flank at the northernmost redoubt, which is
mysteriously marked V.P. on my map.

V.P.  That is the Vital Point, upon which Alphonso intends to deliver
his main attack.  I mustn't look at it too long when I'm in the air, or
the Turks may guess our plans.  One glance through my quivering
binoculars is all that I may give it, then we bank over quickly and fly
south, down the length of the Turkish position, with shrapnel bursting
harmlessly below us.

The main force of the Turks is concentrating on the right bank of the
Tigris.  Here we circle round and round at our ease, counting camels,
swooping down towards the square fort where we believe Nur-ud-din's
advance headquarters to be, and occasionally dropping a few two-pound
bombs to emphasise our presence and annoy the enemy.

We are safe, except for risk of engine failure, for there are no enemy
aircraft.  But two of us, in the only other Maurice Farman, have
recently crashed in front of the Turkish trenches, and are now
prisoners, leaving Jumbo and me and the Flight Commander as young gods
on whom Fate depends.  To us three, and only to us, the past, present
and future of this country is spread out like a map each morning.

If only my eyesight were better, I should be happy.  But sometimes the
responsibility of that morning glimpse of V.P. appals me.  Are they
putting up more barbed wire?  One line of it I have seen, compared with
three lines farther south, and some ugly-looking pits, with stakes in
them.  Land mines also.  And gun emplacements.  I had hoped to show
Alphonso a photograph of artillery positions this morning, but there
was no ice for my developer, and the tepid metolhydro-quinone curled
the film off my plate.  That may cost the lives of soldiers.


The great day has come: dawn of the 28th of September, 1915.

Yesterday afternoon, Alphonso made a feint attack on the Turkish right.
Now he has transferred his whole force to the north of the Tigris,
except two weak battalions.  Eight thousand men have been marching
through this stifling night to attack V.P.  The remainder--a brigade of
infantry--are to make a holding attack near Horse-Shoe Marsh at the
Turkish centre.

If we succeed in this manoeuvre--one of the boldest in history, for we
have left only a thousand men to guard all our transport--we shall
capture all the Turkish army in these parts, and enter Baghdad within a
week.

We soar up over the black scrub of Nakhailat, and pass over the pale,
pink face of the desert.  Our men are still marching, marching down
there; the Turks waiting and wondering.  This time we shall see V.P. as
it really is.  The Suwada marsh looms up; round it is a yellow mist.
Now I can discern the blur of trenches where soon a multitude will die.

The stars vanish: a red sun rises: the guns speak.  Here are my
scribblings to Jumbo during a tense hour: they have survived the War,
and I like to remember these snatches of talk.

"7.5.  Hell of a bombardment in centre section.  In front of Delamain.
Our troops advancing.

"Down the front line to give them hell.

"7.25.  Body of troops retiring 0.3.3.5 behind Turkish trenches.  Not a
soul in reserve line.

"Cavalry moving out from Kut.  Where is ours?

"Down to Delamain.  There's the landing T.

"8.10.  Can't waste time.  This looks as if we'd won."

We have won.  V.P. has been taken.

Shells fall round us where we land amongst some of our dead.  As I run
up to the headquarters of the attacking column, I see boys of the
Dorsets and Oxfords, and men from the Punjaub, from Central India, from
Madras, lying still, spread-eagled.  The wounded are being carried back
in stretchers.  A batch of Turkish prisoners is being marched to the
rear, begging for water.  There is no water that is not brackish in
these marshes.

Suppose we lost this battle?  I don't know why the idea flashes into my
mind in the moment of victory.  But it does.  Is this a dream?  What
are we all doing?  I drop into a walk as I reach General Delamain, near
the taken trenches.

He is white with sweat and salt.  A night march is always anxious, and
three-quarters of his force is lost, for six battalions have marched
round the wrong side of Ataba Marsh, to the north of us.  It was
half-past seven before he discovered this, but nothing daunted, he
attacked with his remaining two battalions.  It is a miracle that V.P.
is in our hands.  To gain it we have lost seven hundred killed and
wounded, but the key of the Turkish position is in our hands.

Now we are sweeping round to attack the centre of this northern
section, where the Turks are more deeply entrenched.  With luck we
shall take them in rear, but the absence of six thousand men makes the
issue uncertain.

Bits of arms and legs are lying at the lip of the trenches.  Our
gunners had the range to a nicety.  Yes, there was only one line of
wire.  My eyes eat up the features of this ground that I have been
scanning for three weeks from the air.  There were three gun
emplacements instead of two--that was a mistake of mine.  Most of our
losses occurred when our men were enfiladed from the centre of the
position, but the air report was right enough in saying that V.P. was
weakly held in comparison to the other trenches.  I must hurry back to
Alphonso with this good-but-might-be-better news.

When I reach Jumbo again, I remember that I have a full water-bottle at
my belt, iced by flying, which I forgot to give to Delamain.  Someone
must have it.  There's an old Turkish sergeant groaning in his beard
and holding his stomach.  He sluices its contents down his throat,
looks at me in grateful wonder, gasps, falls down.  Water is said to be
fatal on a wounded stomach.  Have I killed him by mistake?

Off we go.  Alphonso is breakfasting in a kind of water-tower, from
which he hopes to survey the battle as soon as the sun rises higher.
He will see nothing, I know, but mirages; still, he must do something,
and this dallying with eggs and bacon serves its purpose.  His Sam
Browne belt is stuffed full of revolver cartridges: he is resplendent,
calm, confident.  Napoleon has committed his veterans: victory will
light on his eagles.  The Staff seem grave (we have three hundred miles
of desert behind us in case of retreat and only a handful of men to
guard our communications) but not Alphonso.  I tell him that V.P. is
taken, that we have had heavy losses, that three-quarters of our force
has gone astray.

"That's quite all right," he answers.  "Fly back, and tell General
Delamain that I am very pleased with him."

Not a word about the lost six battalions.  I suppose be supposes
they'll turn up.  Anyway, he is quite sure we'll win.

It is past ten o'clock when we return to Delamain, and deliver
Alphonso's message.  The lost battalions have been sighted, having
plodded round the Ataba Marsh in time to join in the battle for the
centre trenches.

It is lucky we have them.  Delamain has not yet been able to dislodge
the strong-kneed Turks, and our men are exhausted with marching and
fighting and thirst.  Some of them--Punjaubis--creep under our wings
while we are reporting to Delamain.  They should be fighting.  Having
had plenty of water and sleep myself, I have also some courage, but I
am afraid of their fear, and am delighted when we are ordered to go up
again into the fresh air.

Things are not going too well, as seen from above.  Enemy
reinforcements are hurrying across the river in support of their
comrades, and the _Mejidieh_ (a Turkish transport) is steaming down
from Kut, laden with troops.  All round the marshes mounted Arabs are
massing.  It is curious being up here, cool and safe, watching the
ships and horses and men that crawl below us among puffs of smoke.  I
am the first man, and I daresay the last, to see the whole of an
old-fashioned encounter battle from the air.

There is no sign of our cavalry, who are supposed to be striking terror
into the Turkish rear.  In front of Horse-Shoe Marsh a battle is in
progress.  We cannot break that line with two weak battalions.  Will
the Turks counter-attack?

It is eleven o'clock when we return to Delamain.  He has been able to
capture but very little more of the enemy line, and looks ten years
older than when I saw him at dawn.

Where is our damned cavalry?  Nobody knows.  I can't find out.  The
Turks are massing steadily.

The decisive moment that occurs in every engagement has arrived.
"We'll take those trenches before noon," says Delamain: "The Oxfords
are going to attack.  I'll be with them.  You two go up at once and
report what's happening: it's now or never."

I salute, and run back to Jumbo who is standing by the aeroplane.  As
we take off, I see Delamain on a gun limber with field-glasses to his
eyes, a tall, gaunt man, with jaw set: inspiration incarnate.

"At 'em," I scribble.  "We'll chance the height."

A forest of rifles is pointing at us from the centre trenches, but the
Turks will have no time to think of aeroplanes when the Oxfords get
amongst them with cold steel.

Our troops have deployed and are advancing steadily, wave after wave of
gallant men marching through the Turkish fire as if they were on a
King's parade.  Wonderful.  The first wave has reached the trenches.
Never shall I see such things again.  A volley has burst through our
fuselage.

Jumbo is hit in the neck!  Yet he's flying as if nothing had happened,
with a red trickle at his nape.  I must tie him up.  Where's that first
field dressing?  Fool that I am, I've let it stream back into the
propeller.  But we have dived out of rifle range.  I lean forward and
shout in his ear.

"What?"

"Your _neck_!"

He is too young to die.

Jumbo puts his hand up and is amazed at the sight of blood.  He circles
round once more.  The opposing forces look like ants, tapping each
other with their feelers.  Some of the ants lie still.  Hurrah, the
Turks are leaving their trenches and the Oxfords are bayoneting them as
they run!

"Down!" I signal.

We must give the news of victory to Delamain.  Jumbo makes perfect
landing.

"Go to the ambulance while I report."

"Bosh!" says Jumbo, or words to that effect.

There is no time to argue.

When I return, he is munching a stick of emergency chocolate.  He has
tied up his neck with his handkerchief and refuses to report himself as
wounded, lest the doctor should forbid him to fly.  It is only a
scratch, he says.

The Oxfords have won the main trenches.  We are still far from water,
and have had more losses, but we have captured eight guns, and many
prisoners.  Delamain is so tired that he can hardly talk.

When we return to headquarters, Alphonso has come down from his
watch-tower and is preparing for pursuit.

"The enemy will retreat," he says, "and I don't want them to escape in
the night."

Is he as sure as he looks?  Yes, in spite of the fact that we have lost
as many men as the Turks, that our forces are about equal, and that we
have been marching all night and half the day under a blazing sun,
while they have been sitting still, we shall win, for there is a
strength upon Delamain and Alphonso.

Delamain is advancing towards the river now, and he may cut off the
Turks by getting between them and Kut.  On the other hand, he may not
reach the river at all, for five thousand men and four Krupp guns of
Nur-ud-din's force from the right bank are now crossing the Tigris by
the boat bridge, and are about to attack his flank.  From the air I see
this clearly, but I can't tell Delamain, for there is no landing-ground
where he is.  We must try to drop a message.

I write it and drop it with a streamer attached.  Then we follow up the
Tigris to Kut, looking for our cavalry, and for signs of a general
retreat on the part of the Turks.  We keep at 4,000 feet--for Jumbo's
neck is precious to the 6th Division--and scatter some of our bombs
round the _Mejidieh_, trying to drop them down her funnel.

After an hour's flying, we circle back and land by Delamain at the
Tigris.  It is now a little after five o'clock, and he has won another
battle.  He saw the Turkish reserves in time, turned on them like a
tiger, drove them back.  But the men are too exhausted to pursue,
having only just strength enough to drag themselves to the river, and
drink, and be sick, and drink again.

Our own and the enemy wounded are being evacuated in barges.  They are
mad with wounds and thirst: the few doctors are almost helpless: it is
a really frightful scene: poor devils creep to the dressing-stations on
their hands and knees, over decks slippery with blood and diarrhoea.

We can't reach Kut to-night.

Once again we go up in the twilight.  Jumbo tosses the old Maurice
Farman about like a tumbler pigeon, partly because we've won, and
partly because we must forget what we've seen.  Groups of the enemy
near Kut have clustered themselves together against the Arab bands that
skirmish closer and closer in the gathering darkness, hungry for loot.
At A.5.15; A.5.1.6.7.8., there are groups of deserters on the Baghdad
road.  I am busy with map and note-book.

At nine o'clock, in the dark, we land at Nakhailat.  Alphonso has
already embarked.  His Staff have the figures of the Turkish losses: 17
guns, 1,289 prisoners, 1,700 killed and wounded.  Our casualties are
1,220 killed and wounded.  That's a fine victory.

For seventeen hours, Jumbo and I have been at full stretch, and for ten
of them Jumbo has been in pain.  Into them have gone anxiety, hope,
fear, horror and joy, pressed down and brimming over.  He and I and
Reilly say little over our tinned mutton and coffee; and my eyes begin
to close before the food is finished.




CHAPTER XIII

THE LONG DESCENT OF WASTED DAYS

The pursuit from Es-sinn failed because our barges stuck on the
sandbanks of the always-treacherous Tigris.  At Ctesiphon the Turks
rallied.  Our main body halted at Azizieh, a dusty little camp some
eighty miles from Baghdad and thirty from the Turks.

For a couple of months, during the lull in the fighting, I continued my
routine between the desert and the dark-room.  But by the beginning of
November, 1915, it was apparent that a change in our mode of life was
impending.  Clear-the-line messages had been throbbing over the wires.
Unit Commanders had met Alphonso in high conclave.  To advance, or not
to advance?  Something had to be done quickly, for reinforcements were
arriving for the Turks as a consequence of our fiasco in the
Dardenelles.  We had to go back or forward.  So Alphonso made the best
of what he privately considered to be a wrong decision, and recalled
every available detachment from his lines of communication to prepare
for the attack.  Before the battle, he had convinced us all that the
Mesopotamian capital was within our grasp.

Meanwhile, an Australian pilot and I were chosen to cut the telegraph
lines that run east and north of Baghdad, in order to isolate the city
from the troops hastening southwards under Marshal von der Goltz.  The
round trip would be two hundred miles, at least, and as our machine
could only keep the air for three hours without refuelling it was
necessary to take spare petrol and oil, and fill up before returning.

After dinner on the eve of this adventure, I spent an hour with the
engineers, testing detonators, and primers, and slabs of gun-cotton.  I
turned-in early and slept well, confident of success.  We would have to
land twice in hostile territory and make two demolitions; but I never
doubted that all would go well.

Already I looked forward to a holiday after the capture of Baghdad.  I
had been promised a transfer to the training-school at Cranwell as soon
as I could be spared; and I told myself now that I would return with a
new ribbon under my wings, and a Persian carpet in my luggage.

Before dawn on November 13th "Australia" White and I stowed away eight
extra gallons of petrol and four of oil in the old Maurice Farman.

Up we went into the still air, away from our sleeping camp.  The
bivouac fires of the nearest Turkish outpost at El Kutunie mounted
straight to heaven.  It was a clear morning.

A few of the enemy were bustling about, and rubbing their eyes, and
cursing us, for we had disturbed them earlier than usual.  Away to the
south, one of our steamers was threading her way up the shoals of the
Tigris, carrying reinforcements and the English mail.  I told myself
that I would find good reading on my return, and have good news to
write.

Down there the world was still in a velvety purple twilight, but our
fuselage was spangled with light from over the Persian hills.  Ahead
there was Zeur, the chief Turkish outpost, with its
twenty-times-snapshotted trenches.  Now the sun had begun to slant
across the scarred face of the desert, showing up men and horses and
mounds and irrigation cuts in strong relief.

The enemy had been active since last I had viewed his dispositions,
forty-eight hours ago.  In the maze of trenches by Seleucia there were
more zigzags than ever.  Grass huts were building by the Arch.  Six
barges were being towed down from Qusaibah to the main position, gravid
with troops.  A thousand camels carried provisions towards the new
"V.P."  A convoy drawn by white horses looked German in its glinting
precision.  There would be much to tell Alphonso, when we returned.  I
longed to study these preparations better, but that would have to wait
until to-morrow--perhaps.

Perhaps?  No, certainly to-morrow.  Wire-clippers hung at my belt, and
pencils of fulminate of mercury reposed in my coat-pocket, out of
harm's way but readily accessible.  The brown road leading from Baghdad
to Feluja stood up out of the surrounding pinkness.  That was our
objective, for the telegraph lines ran parallel to it, but near Baghdad
I saw that there was a constant traffic of horsemen and camels.  We
would have to fly west, into the desert.

We turned away from Baghdad, looking immense and magical under its
date-palms, and headed towards the Euphrates glimmering on the horizon.
The two rivers, the five lakes, the city and the mountains, and far to
the north the gold domes of Kazimain, were sights to fill the eyes, had
it not been for the nearer view of five or six thousand camels, swaying
and slouching towards the markets of the capital.  Those brutes were a
blot on the landscape.

I felt as if I were at the start of a race, watching for the gate to
rise.

We circled down towards the most solitary part of the line visible to
us, at a place called Nimrod's Tomb.  In two minutes we would know our
fate.

The next two years, however, I would like to pass over without comment,
for they are a time apart in my life.  But as I cannot leave the reader
in mid-air, I shall repeat what I have already written in order to
bring this exploit to its end.


"We made a perfect landing and ran straight and evenly towards the
telegraph posts.  I stooped down to take a necklace of gun-cotton from
the floor of the bus, and as I did so, I felt a slight bump and a
slight splintering of wood.

"We had stopped.

"I jumped out of the machine, still sure that all was well.  And
then----

"Then I saw that our left wing-tip had crashed into a telegraph post.
Even so, the full extent of our disaster dawned slowly on me.  I could
not believe that we had broken something vital.  Yet the pilot was sure.

"The leading edge of the 'plane was broken.  Our flying days were
finished.  It had been my pilot's misfortune far more than his fault
that we had crashed.  The unexpected smoothness of the landing-ground
and a rear wind that no one could have foreseen had brought about
disaster.  Nothing could be done.  Nothing remained--except to do our
job.

"I ran across to another telegraph post, leaving the pilot to ascertain
whether by some miracle we might not manage to taxi back to safety in
our running partridge of a machine.

"By the time I had fixed the explosive necklace round the post, a few
stray Arabs, who had been watching our descent, began firing at us from
horseback.  I set the fuse and lit it, then strolled back to the bus,
where the pilot confirmed my worst fears.

"Presently there was a loud bang.  The charge had done its work and the
post was cut neatly in two.

"Horsemen were now appearing from the four quarters of the desert.  On
hearing the explosion, the mounted men instantly wheeled about and
galloped off in the opposite direction, while those on foot took cover,
lying flat.  To encourage the belief in our aggressive force, the pilot
stood on the seat of the bus and treated them to several bursts of
rapid fire.

"Meanwhile, I took another necklace of gun-cotton and returned to my
demolition.  This second charge I affixed to the wires and insulators
of the fallen post, so as to render repair more difficult.  While I was
thus engaged, I noticed that spurts of sand were kicking up all about
me.  The fire had increased in accuracy and intensity.  So accurate,
indeed, had it become, that I guessed that the Arabs (who never can hit
a haystack) had been reinforced by regular troops.

"I lit the second fuse, then covered the hundred yards back to the
machine in my best time, to reach cover and companionship.  A heavy
fusillade was now being directed on to the machine, at ranges varying
from fifty to five hundred yards.

"Bang!

"The second charge had exploded.  The telegraph wires whipped back and
festooned themselves round our machine.  The insulators were dust.

"Doubtless the damage would take some days to repair: so far so good."


The rest was bad.  Our captors were Shammar Arabs, who debated among
themselves whether to cut off our heads, or whether to bring us living
to the Turkish Commander at Suleiman Pak and claim a modest reward for
our capture.  Fortunately for us, a detachment of Turkish mounted
police arrived while this discussion was in progress, and decided our
fate by taking us from the Arabs.  We were borne in triumph into
Baghdad, where the populace spat in our faces.

Then, while the British attack at Ctesiphon was at its height, we were
sent north to Mosul, and imprisoned in the fortress there.  So we
passed out of the world of living men, into prison life.


The truth about the next twenty-four months it would not be in my power
to write, even if I wished to do so.  And I do not wish.  Prisoners see
war without its glamour.  The courage and comradeship of battle is far
from them.  They meet cruel men, and their own fibre coarsens.  A
chronicle of these wasted and miserable hours, of dirt and drunkenness,
of savagery and stupidity, would not only be dull, but remote from my
subject.

I shall record only two incidents therefore: to write more would be
useless, to write less would be to forget that out of fourteen thousand
prisoners of war in Turkey only some three thousand returned to England.

I saw a party of twenty English soldiers, who had been marched from
Kirkuk across the mountains, arriving moribund on the barrack square at
Mosul.  They were literally skeletons alive, and they brought with them
three skeletons dead.  One of the living men kept making piteous signs
to his mouth with a stump of an arm in which maggots crawled.
Presently he died in a fit.

Then there was the saddest tea-party at which I have ever assisted.  We
had bribed a sentry to allow us to give two of these men a meal of
bread and buffalo-cream which we had prepared out of our slender
resources.  Our guests told us that they were kept in a cellar, with
hardly enough room to lie down.  Only drinking water and bread were
supplied to them.  They could not wash.  Three times a day they were
allowed to go to the latrines, and sometimes not then, for if a
prisoner possessed anything that the sentry wanted, he was not allowed
to go until he had parted with it.

One of the men now fainted.  The other explained that, starving as they
were, our fare was too rich.  "Australia" White, who was always
foremost in kind offices, carried the sick man on his back to the
cellar, past the bribed sentry, and attended to him as long as he
dared.  But it was to no avail.  When he returned, his clothes were
swarming with vermin, for lice leave the dying.

When our pay was given us, and an opportunity occurred to bribe the
guards, it was a heart-breaking business to decide which of the
sufferers we should attempt to save.  Some were too far gone to help,
others might manage to live without our smuggled food.  But it was
little enough we could do before we were transferred to Aleppo, and
thence to Afion-Kara-hissar, "the black opium city" in the centre of
Anatolia.

The soldier survivors followed.  Many were clubbed to death by the
sentries and stripped naked.  Others, more fortunate, were found dead
by their companions after the night's halt, when they turned out to
face another day of misery.


A criminal's sentence is fixed, but not that of a prisoner of war.
Settled in Afion-Kara-hissar, the future seemed an endless avenue,
leading nowhere.  Spring came, and the days succeeded each other in a
pageant in which we had no part, cooped up as we were.  I know now why
drunkards drink, and how caged canaries feel, and all about bugs.  Lice
we are all familiar with, who served in the War.  Fleas are lively
little beasts.  Scorpions, hornets, wasps, mosquitoes, leeches have
none of them the Satanic quality of bugs.

One squashes a bug and there is a smear of blood--one's own blood.  One
lights a candle, and there, scuttling under the pillow, are five or six
more of the flat fiends.  Having killed every living thing in sight,
one lies back, hoping to sleep.  But they smell horribly when dead, and
keep alive the memory of their itching at neck and wrist.  Presently
out of the corner of one's eye one sees monsters darting about avidly,
magnified and distorted by proximity.  There is no end to them.  You
kill them on the bed and they jump on you from the walls.  You
slaughter them by fives and tens, but still they come from the crannies
where they have lain for months--years maybe--waiting for the scent of
live bodies.  They batten on the young: of two victims they will choose
the healthiest.  They not only suck your blood, but sap your faith in
God.

Under these circumstances, I took to Yoga.  It was little enough that
the _guru_ had told me, yet that little, with some books I had read,
and the immense leisure of these days, enabled me to practise certain
writhings and breathings which I should not have attempted during an
active life.  Time is the essence of Yoga.  The exercises must be
repeated until they become a habit.  At first I was inclined to be
sceptical of results, then surprising things began to happen.

The "head-stand" was a mild gymnastic which I had learned at Sandhurst.
Performed according to Yogic directions, however, it did seem to wash
my brain.  I felt a little giddiness, a slight ache in the jaws
sometimes, but also distinct pleasure in a position which my ancestral
relatives must often have adopted.  Sixteen hours a day of uprightness
is unnatural for the human inside: it is good for it to hang
occasionally the other way up.

Then I tried a breathing exercise.  My early sensations were of
dizziness, but soon there came a kind of clearing in throat and eyes
and ears and brain.  My heart at first accelerated and then retarded
its beat.  After three spells of twenty-one breaths each, I tried
another group of breathings, quicker this time, until I became drunken
with oxygen and rolled about and laughed.

But I might as well try to describe a trip to the moon as tell of such
confrontations of the body with its Self.

Poised and relaxed and completely in my body (not out of it, as the
mystologues would have it) I saw myself at times impersonally.  The
future lay at my feet.  I surveyed it as an interested traveller,
knowing that in some parts of it I could never live, with my volatile
brain; and that in others I was destined to be useful.  I seemed to
stop breathing then, as one gasps at some beauty suddenly revealed, but
this arrest of the heart (if it was that) was smooth and delicious, a
sliding into peace.

And I began to realise, with awe, a millionth part of the temptation in
the wilderness.  When Christ saw the kingdoms of the world before Him,
He may have known, in an unimaginably vivider degree, such a clearing
of the mists of the desire-mind as I had experienced.  His temptation
may have been a choice of paths.

In my enthusiasm, I practised the _bhastrika_ strenuously.  Again and
again I tried it, sending my pulse up to 110, 130, 140 and more.  Might
not the telescope of the lungs reveal the star of Christ?  One night my
finger-tips became blue, and I could not sleep.  When I experimented
with the head-stand next day, in order to whip-up my circulation, I
fainted.

So I tried the writhing _mudra_.  This gentle grinding of the inside so
stirs the thermostatic arrangements that the student of Yoga begins to
perspire freely, and with that opening of the pores comes a sense of
detachment from the physical envelope, which may be (and often is)
considered to be a self-revelation of Dualism.  This thing that was
twisting itself about itself was a clearly subordinate Me, for I could
order it to go faster, or to go slower, or to stop, or to go round the
other way.  My body was not Myself; and the feeling-realisation of this
objective truth marked a point on the Way at which many searchers, as
it seems to me, are content to rest prematurely.

At the end of two minutes I was a bored Dualist.  But finally, a change
occurred.  As I persevered, a directing intelligence took charge of
consciousness, and twisted me round without any apparent effort on my
part; and this intelligence was indeed the Self, and indeed all
kingdoms, principalities and powers.  Glancing at my wrist-watch I was
surprised to see that half an hour had passed.

I was in another current of Being, and a Dualist no longer.  Time,
instead of standing still, raced by my body.  Space, instead of
dividing objects, linked them.  The distinction between creature and
Creator melted away.  The difficult idea of an individual soul
communing with cosmos disappeared in the confident serenity of Unity.
There was a merging and an Emergence; the self that writhed was but a
reflexion of the true Self: its blood flowed in every vein, my soul was
the world's: it was the face of the true sun of creation.  A hymn
echoed through my head, in time with my turning:

  _For ever with the Lord.
  Amen; so let it be;
  Life from the dead is in that word._


The lines took on an intenser meaning.  Life from the dead: here in
this body pent: home of my soul, how near at times Thy golden gates
appear!...

Already, at Agra, I had had a glimpse of the ineffable.  Great truths
are simple.  This one has been described in many ways, but best by Him
who said: "Neither shall they say 'Lo here!' or, 'Lo there!'"...


Summer rode across the open lands of Anatolia.  Women came out to bleed
the poppy-beds that stretched red and white to the mountain of the
horizon.  Some were pretty, and some used to take the soldiers who
formed our guard into the crops.  We remained in prison.

In the autumn, Afion-Kara-hissar was visited by a flight of storks who
swooped and circled over us in their thousands, finally alighting near
the black rock, where they formed black silhouettes against the sunset,
with one leg tucked up, and backward-turning beaks.  I used to dream of
those storks, and of their enchanted journeys, and of Polly, an opium
girl.

But chiefly I dreamed of freedom, and planned to regain it.  That,
indeed, was the bulwark of my sanity.

It would have been comparatively easy to have eluded our sentries, but
Afion-Kara-hissar was separated from the coast by a belt of country
where brigands and deserters roamed.  Moreover, once the sea was
reached, there were only a few places from which Greek islands could be
reached, and those were closely guarded.

I discussed the matter with various friends--Robin Paul in
particular--and we decided that our best and probably our only chance
of escape was an indirect route.  First we must reach Constantinople.
The capital became in our minds a stepping-stone to freedom: we shammed
sick: we tried to bribe a Greek doctor: we even inflicted wounds on
various parts of our bodies.  Robin had a bad ear, and I had displaced
a bone in my nose by boxing, but it was not until I took to smoking
opium with the Cypriote interpreter attached to the Turkish
Commandant's office that my departure became possible.  I will not say
that I bribed him, but his intimacy helped me to bribe others.

Those nights I lay on a sofa with him, _couch  gauche_, as opium
smokers say, weaving a tissue of deceit into the grey-white clouds
encircling us, will always remain among the strangest memories of my
life.  The couches, the medley of cushions, the pipes, the profile of
my host as he leaned over the green glimmer of the lamp which burned
for the god to whom his heart was given, and the growth of that god in
him, as pipe followed pipe; and the beatitude in his eyes when they
found the dream-world where the princes of the poppies reign, seem no
more part of me now than a play, yet I did and felt and saw many
unaccustomed things during that month of make-believe.  And instead of
reading philosophy or playing chess, I was engaged in a game whose
stake was liberty.


Having reached Haider Pasha Hospital with the use of much gold as well
as some guile, my purse was now empty.  I needed two hundred Turkish
pounds to be smuggled to Odessa, and I had only two lira.

However, there were other ways to freedom besides the sea-route, and
when Robin and I were transferred to the Armenian Patriarchate at
Psamattia (a suburb of Constantinople) an opportunity came to reach a
friendly Christian house in the city.

The plan we made was simple.  The window of the room in which we were
imprisoned was set in an apparently sheer wall-face.  Escape from it
looked impossible, but as a matter of fact there were two small ledges
of moulding under the window-sill, which would give us a foot-hold and
a hand-hold, enabling us to gain the shelter of a near-by roof.  From
there we would work our way along other roofs to a place where we could
drop down, out of the sight of sentries.

It was a good plan, because unexpected.  To climb out of a window in
view of six sentries seemed absurd, but we knew that sentries, like
other people, rarely look up above their own height and rarely look for
things that they do not expect.

So on the night appointed (and I must leave the reader to guess what
agonies of preparation preceded it--the subterfuges by which we had
procured maps of the city--the thrill of making ropes--the suspense of
waiting--the schooling of accomplices--the intrigue with the Greek
waiter who was to shelter us) we took off our boots, coiled five
fathoms of linen-strip round our waists, stuffed our pockets and
knapsacks with chocolates, a Baedeker, a compass, a pistol; drank each
other's healths in raki, and blew out our lamp as if going to bed.
That was the signal to an accomplice, who had promised to engage the
sentries opposite our house in conversation.

Grouched under the window-sill, we waited.  The four sentries directly
below us lolled on a bench, smoking and talking.  Two more sentries
were stationed fifty yards up the street.  We heard the cheery voice of
our comrade, offering cigarettes to our nearest guardians.  That was
our cue.

Robin went first and I followed an instant later.

The waiting had been anxious, but the moment my feet were on that
blessed string course (how I blessed the architect who had designed
it!) anxiety vanished and only the thrill of adventure remained.  As we
clambered along, like flies against the sheer wall, a passer-by in the
street blew cigarette puffs almost into our nostrils.  But no one
looked up.

We gained the shelter of the parapet, surprised that our plan had
succeeded, and devoutly thankful.  Very cautiously, now that the worst
was over, we wriggled on towards freedom.  The parapet was lower than
we thought, and the wriggling slow; in order to take advantage of our
cover we had to lie flat on our stomachs.  After more than an hour of
this progression, we had reached the place where we had thought to slip
our rope, but found that just across the street an officer of the Fire
Brigade sat at an open window, overlooking us.  By the manner in which
he peered about him it was evident that he was expecting someone to
keep an appointment.  He stared so intently that at one moment we
thought he had seen us, as was very possible, for his window was on a
level with our roof and only a few yards away.

Meanwhile the moon was creeping up the sky, and about to flood us with
such a radiance that even a love-sick officer of the Stamboul Fire
Brigade could not fail to notice us.  For a whole further precious hour
this annoying Romeo kept watch, while we discussed him in whispers, and
cursed feminine unpunctuality.  At last just as we had decided to let
go the rope and take our chance (for our protecting belt of shadow had
narrowed to inches) Romeo began to yawn, and stretch, and look towards
his bed.  He hesitated, yawned again, then gave up his hopes of Juliet
and retired.

That was our moment.

We made the rope fast to a convenient ring in the parapet and stood up.
Traffic had ceased in the street.  The moon was at our backs and shone
directly in the sentries' eyes.  If they had seen us and fired we
should at any rate have been uncertain targets.

I took a long breath and slid down, kicking the signboard of a shop in
my descent so that it clattered hideously.  Robin, who followed, cut
his hands to the sinews in his hurry.

In spite of the noise, no one stirred.  A dog's yapping stabbed the
silence.

Here we were, free, in an empty street.  All the world was before us.

A moment before, the limelight of all the universe had seemed to shine
on us; and the noise we had made still echoed in my ears.  Yet we had
aroused not the smallest excitement in any breasts but our own.

Can you imagine the miracle, liberty-loving reader, that happens to a
man who finds himself free after two-and-a-half years in Turkish
prisons?

We were the proudest and happiest men in the world on that July night
of Ramadan.  The slothful years had vanished as we drew a breath.  We
lit cigarettes.  We strolled away pretending we were Germans, and
singing:

  _Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein
  Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein._


Only once did we think we might be recaptured.  As we were passing the
Fatih Mosque, we heard a clatter on the cobbles behind us.  A carriage
was being galloped in our direction.  We doubled into some ruins, and
lay there.  I trembled so much that I might have had a bout of fever.
After all our success, the Psamattia garrison might still hunt us down.

The moon had reached her zenith: I looked up, and longed to be amongst
the wispy clouds that crossed her light.  A cat saw us, halted, watched
us with glazing eyes.  Then the carriage passed, empty of passengers,
with a drunken driver.  It rattled away into the night.

We emerged, and took our way through the streets of old Stamboul, under
the chequered shade of vines, safe and free and triumphant.




CHAPTER XIV

CHRISTMAS, 1918

I cannot convey the thrill of that escape, for it will seem, as indeed
it was, a fairly tame affair.  Hundreds of prisoners have crept through
the barbed wire of German camps, eluded bloodhounds, travelled long
distances in disguise.  But to me my first escape was from more than
the Turks: I have freed myself also from an "inferiority complex."


We knocked softly at the door of the house in Sirkedj where we had
arranged to hide; then flattened ourselves in the shadow, ready for
anything--welcome, betrayal, blackmail.

Nothing happened.  We were about to knock again, when the door opened
an inch, and I saw an eye, low down, level with my waist.

"May we come in?"

"Are you the escaped prisoners?" asked a child's voice, adding
suspiciously, "we expected you two hours ago."  (It was then four
o'clock in the morning.)

"Better late than never," Robin said.

The door opened quickly, and we found a whole family of friendly
people.  Thmistocl, the Greek waiter, and his mother, and aunt, and
old grandfather, and the little twins who had greeted us.

We crept upstairs, careful not to awake the other inmates of the house,
who were also fugitives from justice, according to Thmistocl.  When
we paid him the fifty Turkish pounds we had promised him as the price
of a week's shelter, his horn-rimmed glasses became dim with emotion.

"Everyone is starving here," he said thoughtfully.  "Even the policemen
go hungry for bribes.  Yesterday one said to me, 'For the love of Allah
find somebody for me to arrest.'"

"What did you answer?" I asked.

"I said I would do my best.  But of course I didn't mean it.  Only one
must be careful with the police."

"Yes, you must be very careful.  And where are we to sleep?"

We had been shown into an untidy room, with an icon shrine, and a
rumpled bed.

"Here," said Thmistocl--"my sister and I and the twins will turn out."

"Were you all----?"

"Oh, yes, rents are high, and we are poor people."

So we threw ourselves down, too exhausted to undress, and slept the
sleep of free men.

Next moment, as it seemed to me, although in reality three hours had
elapsed, we were awakened by the twins, who looked on us as their
especial charges and taken down to the pantry for breakfast.

All that morning we stayed there, dozing by snatches but always ready
to bolt into the cistern if the police came.  "The last escaped
prisoner we had lived there by day," the twins told us.  "He was a
forger and has left his tools in the water."

By afternoon, we felt we were safe, and after sending the twins
upstairs to see that the other lodgers were not about, we went up to
our bedroom again, and discussed the situation.

There were various routes out of Constantinople.  Robin Paul decided to
try his luck by land, and after many intrigues, decided to board a
Greek melon-boat bound for Rodosto.  When he left me, he was disguised
as an Arab beggar, and looked so villainous with his darkened face and
hang-dog slouch that I feared he would be arrested at sight.  But a
touch of genius saved him: he carried a bowl of curds and half a
cucumber, which gave him the aspect of a poor but honest man looking
for a seat on which to eat his mid-day lunch.

My own plan was more comfortable, although no more successful than
Robin's, as events proved.  I was to leave Constantinople as the
servant of a Russian Prince who was being repatriated to Tiflis, and
make my way from there to Baghdad.  Unfortunately the prince failed me,
and Robin was caught at Malgara.  He deserved better luck.

As for me, a good angel to escaping prisoners of war in the person of
Miss Whittaker (now Lady Paul) took me under her wing and dressed me as
a German governess in order that I might meet my Russian Prince without
attracting the suspicion of the detectives who shadowed him.  This plan
was entirely successful as far as meeting him went, but Constantinople,
where twenty thousand people were in hiding, and all were ready to sell
their souls to escape, was an easier place to live in than to get out
of.  One night, Eveline Whittaker sent word to say that my Prince had
been hustled off without having had time to say good-bye (or to return
the money that I had lent him) and I had in consequence to make all my
plans afresh.

There was now no object in dressing as a woman, and so I became a
Hungarian mechanic, in a shabby bowler hat, and spectacles, and a dyed
moustache.  I began then to realise how easy it is to live unknown in a
large city; and I had many opportunities of studying the "underworld,"
and of learning history as it is never written but most strangely lived
by a people on the brink of disaster.

Things were on a hair-edge in Constantinople; a burst tyre made us
think the revolution had come at last; we gossiped hopefully about the
imminent downfall of Enver Pasha; and I attended a meeting of
conspirators in the cellar of an hotel where we discussed how we might
hasten the death-throes of the Committee of Union and Progress.

"We'll crucify the Turks," said a Greek--"and eat them in little bits."
Then a bell rang, and the speaker, who was a waiter, hurried away to
attend to his masters.

Rusty-looking muskets were unpacked.  A silk flag was produced,
stitched by Christian maidens, which was to fly from the summit of Aya
Sofia when the Crescent was at last abased.  Enthusiasm is contagious,
and as the evening wore on I began to feel that I was helping to make
history.  Still more jubilant did I feel when my friends cashed cheques
for me (written on half-sheets of notepaper) to the value of five
hundred liras.  My private promise to pay was worth more to them,
apparently, than Turkish banknotes.

With plenty of money, I first bought myself a forged passport from
Thmistocl's friend (an imposing document, stamped, sealed, signed and
delivered by the Governor of Constantinople; which certified, amongst
other things that I was exempt from service in the Army owing to
valvular disease of the heart) and then arranged with a certain Lazz
that he should provide me with a motor boat to take me to Poti or
Odessa.

This Lazz proved my undoing.  We met at Thmistocl's house and I was
about to pay him one hundred pounds when the alarm was given and we
found that detectives and police had broken in.  I tried to bolt for
the cistern, but the way was blocked.  Presently Thmistocl appeared
with two policemen: his spectacles were broken; he had a black eye and
a bloody nose; his collar had burst; someone had rolled him in the
dust.  He trembled terribly as he protested that he had never seen me
before, and no one believed him.

And so my five weeks' scheming ended in a sad little procession of two
terrified children, a weeping woman, a miserable Greek, and some
seedy-smart individuals wending their way to the Central Jail.

      ***      ***      ***      ***

How I was condemned first to an underground dungeon with criminals (the
forged passport had been found in my pocket) and afterwards to solitary
confinement; how I stole a knife and fork from the prison restaurant
and fused switches with them; how I made friends with a nephew of the
Sultan, a prisoner like myself, who had been sentenced to a month's
detention for blowing out the brains of his tutor; how this youth had a
small black eunuch who used to bring me grapes and French novels; how
Robin and I escaped again; and how, a fortnight before the Armistice
was declared we stole General Liman von Sanders own motor car (a
Mercedes, which we hid in the back yard of the house we were occupying,
and guarded with a performing bear) all sounds so improbable that I
shall not write it down in detail.


I lay in bed in a house in the Cotswolds on the first Christmas Eve of
peace, watching shadows from the fire passing over my brass hot-water
jug.  Outside, the waits were singing.

A few months ago, I was shivering on a couple of planks in a cellar
littered with tomato skins and crusts of bread, with sleek rats and
mangy men for my companions.

One of the prisoners had been shackled to the wall by chains rivetted
to his wrists and ankles.

"One gets used to anything in time," he had told me, "except the
bastinado.  I have been here two years, accused of spying (they will
never know the truth) and I am getting weak.  But God is great.  Unless
they beat me again, I shall live for my vengeance."

They did beat him, however, and I saw it, when I was transferred to
solitary confinement in an upper cell, whose window looked out on the
place of punishment.

His ankles were strapped together to a pole, and the pole was raised on
the shoulders of two men, so that he hung head downwards.  A jailer hit
the soles of his feet with a stick as thick as my wrist.  He fainted,
but the beating continued, for the sentence was fifty strokes.  Had he
survived, he would probably never have stood upright again, for the
bones of his feet must have been crushed to pulp.  They untied him and
laid him flat on his back, and offered him water, but he made no sign,
for he had died--of shock, I suppose, like my thorough-bred, The Devil.

There was one spy the less in Turkey.

How impossible that seemed to me now!  Yet there were probably still
men chained somewhere in that dungeon, and others being bastinadoed.  I
would search for no bugs to-night, and rise for no roll-call to-morrow.
I had seen enough for a lifetime of wrath and bitterness and vermin.
My pillow smelt of lavender.




CHAPTER XV

THE END OF SPORT AND SOLDIERING

For months I remained in London, ill.  When at last I was allowed to
return to my regiment, it was to take part in another war.

My hope had been that I should have some leisure to travel through
India and learn more of her people and philosophies.  Instead, I was
jerked like a hooked fish from the waters of Yoga to the arid uplands
of the North-West Frontier.  My only consolation was that I was a Major
now, commanding my own squadron.

In Waziristan I found that we had twice as many men under arms as
Wellington had at Waterloo.  We were paying 30,000 a year in
subsidising the tribes to keep the peace (Nairn Shah's section of the
Afridis received 1,200 a year) and yet there was no peace.  In fact,
during the four years after the Great War, 578 civilians were killed,
669 were wounded, and 981 were kidnapped in 1,315 raids, and property
to the value of 175,980 was looted between Quetta and Peshawar.

In Paris, statesmen talked of self-determination.  Here men fought for
it, and enjoyed the fighting very much, for instead of being compelled
to descend into British India for their booty it was now brought to
their doors.

At Wana, the fort to which I was taking my squadron, the Mahsuds had
recently looted four hundred rifles and about a million cartridges.
Although the fort was now in our hands, they were still playing the
devil in the surrounding country, sometimes carrying off fifty or sixty
camels, sometimes sniping our camps, sometimes raiding isolated posts
and looting 10,000 worth of ammunition.  Our troops toiled through
treacherous passes to make the world safe for democracy, while the
Mahsuds praised Allah for our madness.

If the enemy were enjoying themselves, I was not, for my squadron had a
difficult ride ahead of it through the mountains which led to Wana.
From the bottom of my heart I cursed these contumacious highlanders,
and the policy which sent vulnerable horses amongst them, instead of
tanks and aeroplanes.

Where the river forks at Haidari Kach, I broke my fast with a young
officer who was commanding the convoy of ammunition camels between that
camp and the next, named Dargai Oba.  He was full of enthusiasm, not
yet having seen a year of service.

"I hope things'll jazz up just a little: it's dull seeing nothing but
rocks," he said.

"Isn't the sniping enough?" I growled over my eggs and bacon.

We had had a mule hit during the night, who had screamed until the
humane killer had done its work.

"One gets used to anything.  I've been out eight months and haven't yet
seen one Mahsud in all this wilderness.  I wish I was in Cavalry," he
added, "it's slow work with camels, though the fishing isn't bad in the
Tank Zam.  If I catch any snow-trout, we'll have them for lunch at
Dargai Oba."

Our advance guard galloped off, and I followed with the squadron, at a
walk at first, then at a hound-jog.  We obviously could not search
every inch of country, so all that I attempted to do was to keep my
weather eye lifting for cover, just as I used to look for landing
grounds in Mesopotamia in case of engine failure.

We were in a pretty valley, whose charm was emphasised by the
surrounding rockiness, and the peacock-hued sky above it, but its
fields were untilled and its mulberry-shaded mill-streams idle, for the
inhabitants were all busy with this profitable war.  Wolf-eyes, I knew,
were watching our movements, counting our rifles, observing how we
marched.  But along and above our route were small
block-houses,--"Haig," and "Hunter," and "Ganpat" and "Goli," and so on
to "Jess," and "Jill," and "Oba" and "Ox," each guarding a section of
the road between the camps.

The Indian Officer who was riding beside me was called Valiant Tiger.
The trumpeter's name was Happy Heart.  The leading section was composed
of Tiger Rose and Tiger Heart and Blooming Rose and Rose of the World:
one hundred and twenty lives were in my hands, and many of us had baby
Tigers and Roses and Kings.  I hoped that the block-houses would do
their work.

"Do you see those bushes," I asked my Merciful King, "near the
fat-tailed sheep?"

Nairn Shah's eyes were better than my field-glasses.

"There is a boy with the sheep, Sahib."

"Of course.  And behind him?"

I saw nothing, but asked on principle.

"You are right," said Nairn Shah, standing in his stirrups and shading
his eyes.  "Away--away--aw-a-a-y on the skyline there is a woman
moving."

"Head left wheel!"

I changed direction without checking, and signalled to the advance
guard to do the same.

"I have seen it all," said Nairn Shah.  "There is a woman on the
skyline.  That is enough, Sahib."

"One?"

"One woman on the bare hill between the picquets.  She is not grinding
corn up there."

I called up the troop sergeant.

"Gallop back," I said, "and tell the Sahib with the convoy that there
is a woman on that hill who may be carrying ammunition for men hidden
in those bushes.  Tell the Sahib we have taken a chukkar round, and
that unless he hears any firing we shall be in Dargai Oba by the time
he reaches this place.  Gallop."

For an hour I trotted on, in a circle, returning to the road and
dropping into a walk when close to camp, under the loopholes of "Jess"
and "Jill."

We were about to enter the barbed wire of the perimeter camp, when
half-a-dozen Lewis guns behind us began to chatter.  Things had jazzed
up, as my friend had hoped.

The squadron, however, could not fight amongst those boulders.  Sending
it on to water and feed, Nairn Shah and I cantered back to see the
battle.

Ten machine guns and a hundred men were pouring torrents of lead into
the bushes, and into the rocks above them, but there was no answer from
the enemy, who had already vanished.

A British corporal signaller had received a bullet through his throat.
My friend was slightly wounded in the right hand.

One raider had had his skull smashed in.  On the whole, the enemy's
plans had miscarried.

A dozen Mahsuds had been hidden in those bushes.  Opposite them, a
party of knife-men had lain in wait, so close to our path that we must
have almost ridden over them.  They let us go, for their prey was less
kittle cattle.  The first volley from the riflemen killed the corporal.
Then the knife-men rushed in.

"Ganpat" and "Goli" and "Greaves" had sprayed them with machine-gun
fire.  It was all over in thirty seconds, so my friend told me.  A
camel had escaped in the confusion, and it was presumed that the
Mahsuds had it, with its four thousand rounds of ammunition.  That
worried my friend a great deal, and I could not console him by pointing
out that he had done well not to lose more; and that he had caught a
Mahsud instead of a snow-trout.

"Ganpat" continued firing, more to encourage itself than in any hope of
finding an enemy amongst the echoing and empty rocks.  For another
month at least, no enemy would be seen in those parts.

The corporal we wrapped in a ground sheet, and he lies somewhere in
that pleasant valley, where women are now grinding corn and their
husbands making roads and driving cars.


In Wana, we did nothing whatever for several months.

The fortnight-old newspapers gave me news of politicians who complained
of the heavy cost of the Indian Army.  The Ali brothers preached of the
wrongs of Turkey, and Mr. Gandhi declared that he would oppose the
tribesmen of the North with soul force....  Apparently there was
something in what the Mahatma said, for I was surprised and shocked to
learn that some twenty _sillidar_ cavalry regiments were to be
abolished, my own amongst them.  The authorities called the process
"amalgamation," which sounded better than abolition, but came to the
same thing, since our name, number and identity was to vanish.

Well, I thought, since my friends would soon be scattered, and I had
long wanted to see horizons not discoverable from an Indian cantonment,
I would "send in my papers" as soon as possible.


As if to confirm my decision, I met with a polo accident on my return
from Waziristan.

It happened at Lucknow during a practice game.  I was riding a big
waler, fifteen hands and an inch without his shoes.  I couldn't hold
him, but the collision which ended my career as a cavalryman was not my
fault.  I was on the line of the ball.  An opponent in front of me
hesitated while trying to hit a backhander.  I shouted to him not to
stand on the ball.  It was too late.  My impression, as we collapsed
together, was that I was being squeezed by some resistless power into
his pony's brown quarters.

We sank down, and as I looked through the limbs of our entangled
animals I observed that the other players were reining up and that the
world seemed standing still.  Instead of the whickering of whips, the
rattle of hoofs, and the shouting, I had passed almost instantaneously
into a state of silence and slow-motion.  I turned as I fell, drawing
up my legs and tucking in my chin.

I was now being pressed down into the earth, without haste or apparent
hope of escape.  The other pony and its rider drew apart, but my waler
stood on me.  One of his hoofs was on the back of my neck, and the
other on my right forearm.  I carried him, with my forehead to the
ground in an oriental _salaam_.

Which bone of me would break?

Time slipped backwards and forwards.  With my brain I knew that my
spine might crack, but with my imagination (working somewhere in the
midriff) I saw myself getting up and dusting my breeches.  Then every
incident of my life connected with riding--from a frosty day in Ireland
when my legs first gripped a horse to this uncomfortable
conclusion--passed before me slowly.  It was neat and logical.  It was
_karma_.  Had I concussion of the brain?

No, for I was walking towards the refreshment table, arm in arm with
two friends.

My arm was broken above the wrist.

"My head's all right," I said, "or isn't it?"

"Yes, of course, but you can't go on playing."

"Who said I could?"

"You did."

"How long ago was that?"

I could not remember how I had disentangled myself just a few moments
before.  All the way to hospital I worried my friends for details of
those mislaid seconds of my life, but I have never been able to trace
them.

Yet what I have forgotten, as well as what remains vivid in memory, has
its own tiny place in the Universe, and must therefore influence this
book.

Nothing dies, not even the Present.  Time is a tricky thing; and its
sister, Space, preserves our voices and our gestures for all eternity.
It is simply a matter of the point of view we take.  Somewhere in
space, I am still in that awkward position on the turf of a Lucknow
polo-ground.  Somewhere, also, the thunders of Trafalgar are echoing,
and further back, the roars of a sabre-toothed tiger.  But I wish I
could always think as I did at that moment, and that I had not
forgotten the images which then raced through my mind....




CHAPTER XVI

THE FESTIVAL OF THE FISH-EYED GODDESS

While I lay in hospital, considering where I should go first after I
had left the Service, a telegram came for me from the Army Department
of the Government of India, suggesting that I should accompany an
American author and his photographer on a tour through the country.

I accepted this offer immediately, for I could imagine no more
delightful prospect.  I tore up my resignation, sold my ponies, bought
a typewriter, and as soon as my wrist was well enough I took the train
to Delhi and began four crowded months of travel.


We went first to the plain of Panipat, my American friends and I, and
then to the Ridge, overlooking the capital, from which one may
contemplate the ruins of all the races that have held the sceptre of
Hindustan.

Round us were six ruined Delhis, with their history of a thousand years
of Empire, and the seventh Delhi was at our feet.  We were on the roof
of Hindu Rao's house, of Mutiny fame, which stands like a bridge upon a
ship: a ship of rock, whose bow cuts into the dim sea of the plains.

"There is more land in this country than in Europe from Norway to
Sicily," I said, "and more languages, religions, gods, people.  If you
took the peasants of it only, and stood them shoulder to shoulder, like
an army, they would girdle the earth five times at the Equator.  I know
it is a weariness to tell you such things, but I can't help it, for you
travellers always forget the peasants."

"Don't they want to rule their own country for themselves, like the
lawyers and merchants and politicians?"

"I don't know," I answered.  "It is certain they want a just king and
light taxes, but whether they want democracy is doubtful.  I don't
think any Englishman knows.  We are colonisers and traders, not
wet-nurses.  We are only a drop in the ocean of this humanity.  A
couple of thousand individuals cannot maintain themselves in a
population three times the size of the United States without the tacit
consent of those governed.  If united India wants us to go, we shall
vanish as the mists will vanish from the plain of Panipat at dawn
to-morrow.  But if we did, our tradition would remain, for India never
forgets..."

At that, the jackals began howling, and we returned to our hotel for
dinner.

      ***      ***      ***      ***

The next day we motored to Nizam-ud-din's tomb, where Jehanara lies,
the lovely princess whose modest epitaph was composed by herself in the
age which saw the glories of the Taj: "Let nothing but green conceal
me.  Grass is the best covering for the poor, the humble, the
transitory Jehanara, disciple of the holy men of Chist, and daughter of
the Emperor Shah Jehan."

Into her history is woven, by the twists and quirks of fate, our own
Imperial destinies.  But for her, British India would have had a
different birth.

The story begins by Jehanara's maid upsetting an oil-lamp in the palace
of Shah Jehan.  Jehanara tried to save her, and in doing so she
scorched herself about the face and hands.  Shah Jehan was in a fever
of anxiety about his daughter: the sthete as well as the parent in him
demanded that the best physician in his Empire must attend its
loveliest princess.

Thus it happened that Gabriel Boughton, the surgeon of the English
factory at Surat, arrived at Agra.  Although hampered by the etiquette
of _purdah_ (he was only allowed to feel his patient's pulse from
behind a curtain) he not only cured Jehanara but saved her beauty
flawless.  As reward, he would take nothing for himself, but asked that
a charter should be given to the East India Company to trade in Bengal.

These are the threads of _karma_ that go to the making of ant-heaps and
Empires: a clumsy slave-girl, a kind princess, and an altruistic doctor
who asked for the charter on which the British built Calcutta.  All
round Delhi one may see the warp and woof of modern India.

At Tughlakabad, for instance, whither we went on leaving the grave of
Jehanara, we found the hereditary well-jumpers of the Moghul court
still plying their profession.  In 1922 some twenty of these men were
alive, and all still active, including the eldest, who was ninety-nine.

The shaft was eighty feet deep and only eight feet wide, so that if the
jumpers had taken off with the slightest outward impetus they would
have hit the sides and killed themselves.  The only way to reach the
bottom in safety was to step off as if going down a stair, and this the
old men did.

One after another they went down, making a noise like popping corks.
It was not very exciting, but it was extremely whimsical.  Obviously
the Great Moghuls had enjoyed the sport, for they had cut away one side
of the well in a ramp to the water-level, and had made five archways in
the shaft, so that they could sit with their princesses to watch the
jumpers flash by.

The old men insisted on going through their performance once again, for
they enjoyed the risk, and our admiration, irrespective of the reward I
had offered them.  With glistening eyes, naked, proud, they came to me
in turn after their jump, and extended trembling hands.

"This is the India of tradition," I could not help observing, "the real
India, rooted in the past.  All round us history is being kept alive by
people instead of books.  Near here there is a lime tree, under which
Akbar's favourite musician, Tansen, was buried four centuries ago,
about the time when this well-jumping began.  To this day, the
strolling players of India pluck leaves from it, and eat them, that
their voices may have the sweetness of 'that honey-tongued parrot
without an equal.'  Tansen's memory survives; and the tradition of the
Taj survives in the craftsmen who are working at their hereditary
trades here and at Agra; and John Nicholson, who took Delhi, is still
worshipped by a sect in the Punjaub.  Even Alexander the Great is
remembered, for there is a legend that at a spot where he rested in the
jungle the tigers come out on nights of the full moon, to sweep the
place clean with their tails."

While I discoursed the eldest well-jumper came up to us, wringing his
wet, white beard.

"Sahib, what are we to do with our boys?" he asked.  "Government has
forbidden us to teach them to jump, saying it is dangerous, and that
they must be educated.  Are they to sit in schools with
idol-worshippers instead of learning our ancient craft?"

"Who is to know what you teach them?"

"That is true," he chuckled, "and on bright nights we do still show
them how the trick is done, beginning from the bottom archway.  But
their heads are so full of this new tyranny of education that I doubt
whether they will ever have our skill."

"May Allah, Who is a reader of hearts, keep your descendants in the
right path!"

"Ay, Sahib, He knows best.  But a living is hard to earn.  Before the
Mutiny a rupee bought twenty pounds of flour, instead of half-a-pound,
as to-day.  If our descendants are to become _babus_ instead of
well-jumpers, who is to support us?"

Alas, I did not know.  I gave the old man my blessing and a small extra
gift.


We went northwards now, travelling three days and nights to Nairn
Shah's village across the border, where we enjoyed an illicit tea-party
(for British officers are forbidden to cross the frontier that divides
India from Afghanistan) and an Arabian night's entertainment of Afridi
raids, vendettas, and other adventures, some of which I had to modify
very severely in translation.  We visited Bannu, where my youth was
passed, and Jandola, with its memories of snipers, and Dera Ismail
Khan, and Quetta; and from there, with one of those sudden transitions
which are always possible in India, we journeyed south to the rock-hewn
temples of Ajanta, where the painters and craftsmen of a thousand years
ago have left their portrayal of a civilisation that rivals that of the
High Renaissance in Italy.

The contrast was complete between the living frontier and this world of
stone.  Instead of shepherds with their fat-tailed sheep here was a
lovely little Queen of Benares fainting in the lap of her negro slave;
instead of dancing boys and camels and well-kept rifles and daggers,
the kings of the frescoes were worshipping their golden geese, and blue
gods were embracing fawn-eyes _shaktis_ in mysterious attitudes and
ecstasies.

Who can say why nations rise and fall, why the spirit of genius alights
here and not there?  Everywhere in India this puzzle is seen of
civilisations that triumphed for their hour, and have now gone down to
dust and white ants.  Consummate skill and tireless patience were
lavished on Ajanta.  The chisels of a million workmen hammered on those
cornices; the desires of a race for beauty, for romance, for true
religion are embodied here in stone and paint.  But over the work of
the painters and sculptors stands the doom of time.  The darkness of
Ajanta is full of death.

On the plinth of one of Buddha's altars, polished by the foreheads of
an unknown multitude of worshippers, I saw a dead bat lying, with a
snarl on its rat-face; and I noticed then that there were bats
everywhere, flying among the pictures, hanging from the pillars.

Outside, the sun beat down upon a barren valley.

      ***      ***      ***      ***

The pageant of India that passed before us confirmed this sense of the
futility of human endeavour.  The Residency at Lucknow, with its flag
still flying; Amritsar with its field of slaughter; the _sati_
memorials of Muttra; Bijapur with its whispering gallery, and its
gold-and-ivory gun which used to be manned by artillery-men in pink
fleshings; Podanur where the recalcitrant Moplahs were suffocated by a
ghastly mistake; French Pondicherry where Dupleix dreamed of Empire;
Cochin where the Jews of the tribe of Manasseh (exiled from Palestine
after the destruction of the Second Temple) are now dying of
elephantiasis; Mrs. Besant at Adyar, undaunted at the age of
seventy-five, busy with her Messiah and telling us in her vibrant voice
that "the coming of His hour is nigh, when He shall come again to
mankind, as He did so often in the past"; and more than all, Cape
Cormorin, the southernmost point of India, which has seen Roman and
Phoenician galleys pass, and missionaries, merchants, pirates,
politicians, each with his own doomed dream of conquest--all these
places and people seemed to us but shadows that have passed across the
peace of India.

We dipped down the Braganza Valley into Portuguese Goa and strolled
through the cloisters of the Cathedral of Bom Jesus, where St. Francis
Xavier lies under a magnificent altar.  Round us were the ruins of Goa
Dourada, the richest city in India in the sixteenth century, now a
village of a few huts.

Through a broken gateway, which bore the deer-crest of Vasco da Gama, I
could see the Blue Mountains under the gathering monsoon.  A storm was
about to break: a bell tolled: it seemed to ring for an _auto da f_.
Thinking myself back across the centuries, I saw the Cathedral Square
filling with priests and people.  The bell rang slowly now, as if for
souls about to pass: there was a sharpness in the air....  I rubbed my
eyes: wood smoke drifted across the courtyard: a lizard watched me from
a crumbled wall.  The Holy Inquisition was done with and forgotten,
like Golden Goa, like every alien effort at domination over the
apparently-defenceless millions who live between the breakers of Cape
Cormorin and the snows of Tibet.


And now to Madura, where the Festival of the Fish-eyed Goddess is in
progress.

Minakshi was a princess in Madura long ago; a girl with long and
lustrous eyes, who subdued all earthly princes and even the heavenly
deities with her beauty.  She had three breasts, but when she met Siva
her third breast disappeared, and she knew then that she stood in the
presence of her Lord.

The marriage was arranged and an enormous concourse of people
assembled--as to-day--in the riverbed of the Vaigai.  Amongst the chief
guests was Minakshi's brother, Alagar; but by some unfortunate slip the
date of the wedding was wrongly given in his invitation, so that he
arrived late, and found that the ceremony had already been performed.

He went away in anger, and rested on the far side of the river.  Every
year since then, he comes late to the feast, retires, sulks....  All
over Southern India this story is told, and it brings together a
hundred and fifty thousand people, very gentle and simple and
scantily-clothed, to celebrate the anniversary of Fish-eyed Goddess's
marriage, and her brother's disappointment.

From the bridge spanning the Vaigai, we look down on a moving, mixing
mass of colour: dark blue elephants, light blue water, yellow sand,
green trees, gold chariots, pavonine tinsels of fans and shawls, under
a turquoise sky which stuns the eyes with its hard brightness.  I have
seen crowds as big, but never a kaleidoscope like this.

The heat is murderous, for the monsoon which has been threatening us
for a week has not yet broken.  Young girls glisten under their load of
anklets and bracelets.  Soon their eyes will lose their lustre, and
their skin its glow of bronze, but to-day in their prime, with the kiss
of so much sun upon them, they are as lovely as Minakshi herself.
Their elders fan themselves, wilting.  Terra-cotta babies droop on
their mothers' shoulders.  Alagar himself feels faint in his marquee,
and frankincense is burned under his nostrils to revive him.

Now there is a booming of mortars.  Priests with forked white eyebrows
are clearing a way for the enamelled steeds of the goddess.  There is a
crowding and a crying and a scampering of sacred cows.

When she arrives, the voice of the multitude is hushed: elephants raise
respectful trunks: men, women and children touch finger-tips together
and bow themselves down in a silence that is frightening after so much
clamour.

The heart of India seems to miss a throb; the people are sorry for the
belated wedding guest, sulking in his tent, across river.

But then their mood changes and gives place to gaiety and clamour.
Swings and merry-go-rounds and hawkers and religious freaks compete for
coppers; there is a brisk business in mangoes and fans; a goat is being
sprinkled with water before its head is chopped off; pilgrims are
having their heads shaved; a priest adorns another with the crimson
_tika_ of his caste; children are playing thoughtful games in the sand,
like a motionless hop-scotch; and their mothers are comparing their new
bangles.  But for this heat, I could stay here for hours, watching
India at play and prayer.

Yet what could I learn of the people's heart, so far from mine?  If I
were six years old I might understand it better, but now ... I float
back towards the great temple of Madura upon a stream of pilgrims.

Suddenly that strange, orgiastic pile hulks above me, tier upon tier of
sculptured reliefs that are by turns monstrous and graceful and lewd.
This is only one corner of it: it is repeated in the east and west and
north, and it is one of a thousand such temples.  What an extraordinary
people it was who made these gods and goddesses and hermaphrodites of
stone, that go swarming up to the sky in exuberant confusion, in
renunciations and exaltations inconceivable, and cruelties and
tendernesses I cannot begin to fathom!  If I could know who built this
terrible place (but no one knows) or what these pullulating deities are
about, or even why Minakshi had three breasts, I might begin to
understand this India of the South.

Across the open courtyard, men and women are surging in a maze of
corridors.  Hidden in the darkness of the central shrine stands a
little _lingam_.  The courts and shrines and great carved pyramids
which surround it have been built on an esoteric design which only the
priests understand, and they but dimly.

Somewhere in the temple a parroquet is screaming as if Satan were
pulling his tail-feathers, but where or why I cannot tell, for I may
not set foot beyond the threshold.

Indeed, I do not want to, for I am afraid.




CHAPTER XVII

JAGANATH, LORD OF THE WORLD

At Puri, near Calcutta, where Jaganath rides in his car, we found that
the festival of the year was not due for a few days yet, so we decided
to bathe and then to seek out a temple official to inform us about
Jaganath, and his brother Balarama and his sister Subhadra, those
wooden idols that have been the adored of millions for uncounted
centuries.

Fortunately--for the priests were not very informative--I had an
introduction to the Superintendent of the shrine, and found him ready
to talk.

We broached first a delicate subject--the sculptures of the Black
Pagoda at Konarak.  How, we asked, could any community that claimed the
respect of the modern world condone representations of depravity such
as those which we had seen at Konarak a few days before (even admitting
that they were mingled with other figures of singular beauty and grace)?

"You must remember," said the Superintendent, "that these sculptures
are old.  We Hindus need not justify the manners of a franker age.  But
we _can_ justify them, if you like, by comparing the teaching of
ancient Konarak with that of modern Vienna.  We had a school as you
have a school, that maintains that the roots of psychology lie in sex.
You in the West are inclined to begin the consideration of psychology
with your brain, instead of with your nerves.  Yet the nerves made the
brain.  You must learn to control feeling before you can control
thought, if you would not be meshed in illusion."

"That is the lesson of Konarak?"

"Yes, in so far as the artists who worked there were concerned with
anything but beauty.  They idealised Woman, without whom we could not
be born, nor enjoy," he said.  "To know Woman, through the ministering
senses and the attendant angels is the greater wisdom.  Humanity has
been shaped by Her and through Her it must be saved.  The _lingam-yoni_
is the symbol of the entry of spirit into matter, without which the
world could not have been made, and through whose right function it
must be sustained.  Our human _lingam-yoni_ is but a tiny fraction of
the cosmic energy, a spawning between a certain range of heat and
moisture, beyond which extend Himalayan heights and unutterable
abysses; but even what we have is the greatest of mysteries humanity
may contemplate.  It is the link between the visible and invisible, the
conductor of souls, the fountain of religion.  If even physical love
(to say nothing of the other kind) ceased on earth then the love of God
would disappear, for its knowers would not exist."

"There is a Yoga relating to your worship?"

"Certainly, the _Laya-siddhi_, by which we know the subtlest of the
subtle, who holds within Herself the mystery of creation.  Even in the
West, you have such a philosophy, but disguised, for your whole
material prosperity is based on sex-control, which drives you out to
conquer new worlds, partly in compensation for what has been denied and
partly to enable you to gain the object of your desire.  Up to a point
our teaching is the same, but ours is not inculcated through
repression.  Modesty and continence are virtues necessary to every kind
of Yoga, in the East as in the West, but that does not mean the
thwarting of natural functions."

"Not thwarting, but control," I agreed.  "Yes, in the West we are
becoming choked with desires--and not only for sex--which are driven
into the Unconscious because they cannot find their normal expression."

"You are playing with fire, it seems to me.  Many of your amusements
and most of your ambitions are unnatural.  So are your hours of work,
your hours of sleep, your late marriages, your cheap reading, your
patent foods.  You cannot live unnaturally and have natural sex lives;
and unless you do have natural sex lives either your civilisation will
perish, or your women will revolt."

"Our women are patient, _pandit-ji_, as yours were under conditions
that condemned them to burn themselves alive when their husbands died."

"Yours have no husbands, and burn out their souls in a loneliness more
cruel than the fire of the sail sacrifice."

"I wonder if they would think so?"

"Perhaps not.  The agonies of the Unconscious are not always known,
even to the sufferer.  But there is a vast secret misery in all the
cities of Europe and America, chiefly among your women, but also among
men who have been sacrificed to your chaste commercial Mammon.  Living
as you do, you have neither the time nor the energy for love.  Your
women are not as happy as ours.  They have a fuller exterior life, but
a starved interior life.  Under our caste system, with all its faults,
the deep unseen existence of humanity is better provided for."

"Admitting that for the sake of argument," I said, "I still do not see
how the portrayal of depravity is going to help humanity.  Even here in
your temple I am told there are frescoes in the corridors----"

"--As ugly as a treatise on psycho-analysis!" exclaimed the
Superintendent.  "Certainly they are shocking, for they are meant to
shock.  Everything connected with the worship of Jaganath is
symbolical, and its meaning lies deep in the truths of our religion.
The people understand what they can of such things: we do not demand
the impossible.  Surely it is the same everywhere?  The worshipper can
receive only what his brain or his feeling-realisation can sustain.
Many things must remain hidden.  The approach to the shrine of
Jaganath, for instance, is by avenues corresponding to man's life in
the exterior and interior worlds.  First there are the snares of the
senses, portrayed by paintings and sculptures which your missionaries
describe as of 'appalling indecency.'  Is Freud indecent?  Can truth be
indecent?  I am sure that future ages will look on our Tantrik
psychology of the Unconscious with understanding.  Until a man is
master of his gross body, he cannot see the Godhead.

"But remember," he continued, "that we are only at the exterior
threshold of the divinity symbolised by an earless, legless block of
wood about a yard high, which is Jaganath.  If the worshipper be
blinded by his carnal appetites in these outer courts, he must return
and compose his mind, for he is not worthy of the god.  Only with
undistracted senses may he enter the Dancing Hall, where the
_deva-dasis_ portray the rhythms of creation, not any longer in stone
or paint, but in their living bodies.  That is the second stage.  From
there, the worshipper passes to the Audience Chamber, where his eyes
grow gradually accustomed to the Light Invisible.  I wish I could
escort you round the temple, Sahibs, and explain these things
personally.  We are not fanatical in Puri, but unfortunately such
libels about our worship were published some years ago that now no
European may enter the Lion Gate."

"We never expected to see the inside of the temple _pandit-ji_" I said,
"and although I am a Christian--or because of it--I detest the methods
of some of our earlier missionaries.  But now all that is changed, I
hope."

"Yes, you have come to understand that you need not attack our religion
in order to uphold yours.  The Hindus are the most catholic-minded race
the world has ever seen.  We have never persecuted any faith.  We have
never proselytised any people.  All we ask is to be left alone."

"But frankly, you will admit, I suppose, that all human ordinances have
their defects, even those of _Manu_?  Surely there must be reform in
such matters as _purdah_, child-marriage, and the position of widows?"

"The women of India will change their customs sooner than you think,
Sahib.  But they will not change their religion, for our sacred books
have seen very far into their hearts."

"Yet they teach such things as that a woman should worship her
husband's big toe in the morning: isn't that a relic of slavery?"

"No.  A thousand times no!  Woman with us is a queen, not a slave.  She
is not man's inferior, but a part of him.  The most important part,
perhaps.  Without her, he is nothing.  If she smears his foot with
sandal-wood paste at dawn, that may seem strange to you, but to us it
is an act of reverence to the Creator who has the two sexes in Himself.
It is done for the glory of _Hara_, who is half-man and half-woman, and
whose adored spouse is part of her own being.  Your new psychology
teaches the same thing in other words when it asserts that the
unconscious part of the individual is oppositely sexed.  And I beg you
not to credit the stories you hear about Hindu women being frail and
fainting creatures.  Have you heard two washerwomen talking to each
other across a river?  The Hindu wife is mistress in her own house.
She is worshipped as the mother of the race, as the keeper of
tradition, as the partner in religious rites, as giver of life, and
creative goddess in human form.  Marriage is the pivot of our religion.
The union of the sexes is not a concession to the flesh with us, but a
sacrament.  On the bridal night the husband must enter his wife's room
mediating on _Praja-pati_.  He must touch her and say: 'HRING, O bed!
Be thou propitious to the begetting of a good offspring between us
two.'  He must sit with his face east or north, and looking at her and
embracing her with his left arm, he must touch her head one hundred
times, saying KLING, and touch her chin one hundred times, saying AING,
and touch her throat twenty times, saying SHRING, and again SHRING one
hundred times over each of her breasts.  And so on.  There is also a
ritual for conception, weaning, the end of childhood, the beginning of
adolescence, marriage, home-making, and dissolution--all the chief
moments in the life of the spirit from the time when it enters the
womb, to the time when it rises from the burning pyre.  From birth to
death, and dawn to dark, Jaganath is saviour of our people."

"You have said that he is only a block of wood, _pandit-ji_.  How can
he also be a vital force in your lives?  To us it seems hard to
understand how he and his relations can be more than dressed-up dolls."

"It is our age-long veneration that has brought them to life.  Ours is
a religion of the Unseen, but it must have a focus."

"A bright object on which the mind of the multitude may concentrate?"

"Not quite.  Jaganath is what you call a catalyst," said the
Superintendent, "a mysterious agent that out of two things induces a
third.  Out of our religion and our people, he has made the Car
Festival.  A hundred and twenty _deva-dasis_ dance in his honour; he
has twenty temple elephants, a wardrobe such as no king of the earth
possesses, and two cellars, knee-deep in pearls and rubies and other
votive jewels, which have not been opened for three centuries.  He has
three thousand panders who travel throughout the country on his behalf,
arranging for parties of pilgrims to pay their homage to the Lord of
the World; and a thousand regular priests.  I cannot tell you of all
the wealth and worship he has received since the beginning of time.  He
is an image, but he is also a god, since we have desired him."

"That is a miracle," I said.

"You mean, Sahib, that you think that the age of miracles has passed?
Not so.  We still believe in them."

"Can you tell us, then," I asked, in order to change the subject,
"whether there are any Yogis now living in Puri who possess those
supernatural powers of which we hear in the West?"

"The rope trick and the mango trick?  I have heard of such things,"
said the Superintendent.  "But I have never seen any of them.  If they
happen, they are not supernatural, but due to collective suggestion.
Let me advise you to beware of miracles made to order, especially in
this country.  In India a real student of Nature's finer forces never
wants for a living, and never produces phenomena for cash.  If you are
interested in experiments of an unusual kind, however, there is a Yogi
here who is carrying out researches in animal _Kundalini_.  He is said
to be able to resurrect dead sparrows."

"Could we visit him?" I asked.

"Of course.  Go to his bungalow by the sea.  Anyone can tell you where
he is.  His name is Babu Bisudhanan Dhan."

"Could you give us an introduction?"

"That is quite unnecessary, but you had better tell him I sent you....
He is being watched by the police," he added with a laugh.  "In Europe
of the Middle Ages he would have been burned as a sorcerer; here on the
contrary he is honoured as a teacher.  His friends have equipped a
laboratory for him in Calcutta, and have given him a house in Benares,
and a bungalow here so that he can carry on his work wherever the fancy
takes him.  You will find a group of his students with him, if you go
in the morning."

"I remember that I was told of the _babu_ years ago," I said, "when I
was a youngster in Bareilly.  Certainly we shall call on him,
_pandit-ji_.  Couldn't we go this afternoon?"

"In the afternoon he may be invisible."

"Doesn't he receive callers then?"

"Well, he sometimes vanishes."

"Vanishes?"

"Floats away."


Here was something that my American friends had not been expecting to
find--a man who could raise the dead and vanish!

Accompanied by Nairn Shah, who carried the Americans' cameras, we
descended on the _babu_ next morning and found him teaching his
disciples in the verandah of his house, just as the Superintendent had
said.

He was a very fat man, wearing nothing but the usual loin-cloth and the
Brahminical thread.  He sat in a long chair with his legs curled under
him, talking to ten or a dozen white-habited, middle-aged Bengalis,
most of whom wore spectacles.  Seeing us, he nodded casually, finished
what he was saying, and then smiled.

The Superintendent may, of course, have warned him of our possible
arrival, but if so, he had not told his pupils, who demanded
explanations of our visit from Nairn Shah, and demanded them rather
nervously, I thought.  The _babu_ himself remained inscrutable.  Nairn
Shah looked sheepish; he disliked being mixed up with such matters and
left me to explain.

"I heard of the Mahatma's fame many years ago," I said, "and I have
ventured to bring my friends here so that they may meet a great Yogi
before they return to the United States."

"What is it," a disciple asked me, in English, "that you want the
Mahatma to do?"

"Anything he pleases," I answered.  "We want to learn something of his
supernatural powers, if that is at all possible; and at any rate to
enjoy the privilege of talking to him."

A few words of Bengali passed between the pupil and his master, then
the former answered:

"The Mahatma is in the middle of a lecture about the aspects and
appearances of our Lord the Sun, whose energies he can control.  If you
like, he can summon any scent to appear before us out of the
circumambient ether."

I glanced quickly at the nude _babu_ to see if he were joking.  His
eyes were exceptionally large: they blinked rapidly in my direction, as
if I were some new but not unpleasant kind of creature.

"We should be honoured if the Mahatma would do this," I said solemnly.

"May we take his picture first," my friend suggested, "now that the
light is good?"

I translated.

The Mahatma had no objection.  He posed readily, and with a dignity
that few of us clothes-cramped people possess.

"He lives on a banana a day," the English-speaking pupil told us, with
a kind of paternal pride, "and such is his power over etheric
vibrations that he can quicken his molecular activity until he floats
in the air.  We have seen this, both here and in Benares.  No one knows
his age.  He says he is fifty, but we think he is nearer three hundred
years old.  During my lifetime he has been thirty years in Tibet,
studying the radiations from the sun and moon.  Before that he was
travelling for seven years in the jungles of Central India, where wild
beasts followed him like dogs."

"A banana a day!" repeated my friend, looking at the Mahatma's solid
form.

"And a little water," our informant added, "that is all.  He makes
these concessions to mortality in order to remain on the earth plane.
He never sleeps.  His power over Nature is simply a question of using
the rays from our Lord the Sun."

"What about the sparrows?" my friend asked.

"Unfortunately we have no sparrows here, or the Mahatma would show you.
He brings life to them after they are dead by using the sun's rays in a
certain way.  The sparrows are strangled by a sweeper, and left in the
sun for four hours, to make sure that they are dead.  The Mahatma then
lets a little light fall on them through a magnifying-glass, using a
_mantra_ taught to him by his Tibetan _guru_, whose vibrations can
reach the heart of birds.  Their feathers begin to ruffle.  They move
their wings and open their beaks.  In a moment they are on their feet,
hop about, flutter away.  It is very curious."

"Most remarkable," we agreed.

Meanwhile the Mahatma had curled himself up again in his chair.  He
called for cotton-wool and a magnifying-glass, which were brought to
him by a disciple.  I watched this man carefully without being able to
detect the slightest sign of collusion.  Indeed, on making enquiries
about him afterwards, I learned that he was a respectable small banker:
this fact would not indeed preclude his being a conjuror's accomplice,
but makes it less probable.

The Mahatma took the cotton-wool in his left hand and the glass in his
right, focusing a spot of light upon the wool.  Immediately the room
was impregnated with the perfume of attar of roses.

He waved the scent away with his hand, and I certainly had the
impression that it vanished at his gesture.

"What other scent would you like to come?" he asked me in Hindustani,
with a smile that showed two rows of perfect white teeth.

I suggested violets, and instantly the room was full of the scent of
violets.  Then I suggested eau-de-Cologne, and there was a hitch, for
he did not understand.

"Name any Indian scents, and he will bring them at once," said the
pupil.

My friend suggested carnations, but I could not remember the Urdu for
them, and the pupil could not visualise them from my description.

"Can he make the scent I am thinking of appear?" I asked, "even though
I cannot give it a name?"

The Mahatma smiled and shook his head.

So I named musk, and sandalwood, and opium, and heliotrope, and
flowering bamboo, and nicotine plants at evening.  Each came instantly.
There was nothing near him that could have served as a receptacle.  He
had no sleeve, no table, nothing but a magnifying-glass and a piece of
cotton-wool.

"Has the Mahatma powers of hypnotism as well as the power to direct
solar energy?"

I asked the question to the room at large.  There was a general laugh.

"In one instant, the Mahatma could hypnotise all of us together," said
a little man in horn spectacles, who looked like a shop-keeper, "or all
of us separately," he added.

"May we photograph him while he is summoning a scent?" my friend asked.

The Mahatma seemed to be getting bored, but consented to be snapshoted
twice, while he produced out of the air--or was it out of our
imaginations?--the heavy odour of jasmine and the acridity of burning
cattle-dung.  The latter seemed to make my eyes water, and if that was
imagination then everything is of the stuff of dreams.

We three men of the West had all had some training in the use of our
eyes, yet we were led by our noses into an impasse on this hot, bright
June morning.

Acknowledge a miracle I would and will not.  With my brain I refused
and rejected it, but with my body I was fain to believe.  And now
another emotion overrode curiosity.  I wanted to escape the contagion
of credulity that the Mahatma had induced in us.

My friend suggested that in a few days' time the Mahatma might show us
the resurrection of sparrows.  He smiled and stared ahead of him,
vaguely, until I repeated the observation.  Then he spoke in Bengali,
instead of Urdu; and not to me, but to a pupil.

"He says that he is not fond of crowds and will not be here for the Car
Festival," said the interpreter.

"Ask him if he knows why we came?" my friend persisted.

Again the answer had to be translated from Bengali.

"He says he knows, but that his _guru_ told him long ago that such
questions should never be answered."

Silence.

I was conscious of something hostile in the atmosphere.

"I fear we have been interrupting the Mahatma's lecture," I said, and
paused, in case he should deny it.  As he did not, I observed that we
were grateful to him for the time he had given us, and that if it was
convenient we would now take our leave.

"You are masters in this house," said the Mahatma, bowing in his
deck-chair.  "You have greatly honoured me."

"On the contrary, it is we who have been honoured."


What had we seen?  Conjuring?  Black magic?

"The _babu_ may be a fraud or a hypnotist," I suggested, "or he may
have some way of harnessing etheric vibrations.  Anyway, he has a band
of disciples who believe in him sufficiently to pay for his work.
Experiments like this have been continuing for centuries, along lines
very different from those of any Western science.  Perhaps there is
something stirring, something shaping itself out of the mists of
superstition on this old continent which will spread its influence over
all the world.  Even along our own narrow lines, Indians have arisen
whose extraordinary attainments are unquestionable.  Disbelieve in this
_babu_ if you like, but you must accept Bose, Raman, Meghnad Saha,
Tagore, Gandhi.  By whatever standard you judge them they are men of
distinction, and there will be many more, when we discover more of
India."

And the more I considered these matters in which my mind disputed with
my senses, the less confident I became that my brain was right.


The monsoon had broken, but pilgrims were still flocking into the wet
and insect-ridden city.  A hundred thousand of them had arrived, and
billions of insects of every kind.

At dinner these latter made a massed attack upon our lamp and fell in
battalions around it: their scouts even reached our soup.  Our
mosquito-curtains were coated with praying mantis and beetles, moths,
winged ants.

Outside the hotel, pilgrim waggons creaked by.  Ox-nose to tailboard of
the cart ahead, a multitude of creatures were being drawn into the
flame of the Lord of the Age of Iron.

      ***      ***      ***      ***

It is early morning.  From the Lion Gate, for a mile of broad avenue
leading to the Garden Temple, the concourse of the people of Jaganath
makes one vast composite body of brown skin and white cloth.

We are in a roped-off enclosure, containing high officials and the
vehicles of the gods.  The cars are cottages on wheels, with
thirty-foot towers, betinselled and beflagged, and embroidered with
celestial beasts.  That of Jaganath is a little bigger than the others,
and has sixteen wheels: the others twelve.  They are made new each
year, being broken up after the return from the Garden Temple, in order
that the sacred wood may be sold to the people.

In front of the cars sit the drivers of the gods, magnificent wooden
coachmen in a striped livery of yellow.  They are quaint figures on the
ground, whipless, reinless, grinning at the crowd, with their elbows
out in regular coaching style; but when the gods take their seats they
will be demigods themselves, driving three thousand pilgrims each.  The
ropes to which the worshippers will be harnessed lie coiled beside them.

In this enormous crowd, there is not the colour and animation of the
Madura festival, for the people are squatting; but the bourdon note of
all these blended voices drowns the roar of the sea a few hundred yards
away.  Priests move among the people with fans, and sprinkle them with
holy water.  There is a coming and going at the Lion Gate.  We are
packed to suffocation, and blanketed under clouds.  The air is electric
in every sense, for the monsoon overshadows our bodies and the gods our
souls.

It is now eight o'clock and I hear that the gods are not likely to
hurry over their toilette.  The morning hymn must be sung to them,
camphor burned before their beds, their libations poured, the holy food
offered, and their teeth cleaned by rubbing their reflection in a sheet
of burnished gold.  These things will take time, and I shall breakfast
while the gods make ready.


Ten o'clock.  Two policemen are with us, but even with their help it
would be impossible to return to the Temple Square, so packed is it.
Instead, we enter the back of a house which has a balcony overlooking
the car enclosure.  Amongst the elect, I see the temple Superintendent
rushing about with a garland of marigolds round his neck.  He is
signalling to a mounted Englishman in khaki--the District
Superintendent of Police.

Subhadra is coming.  Ripples of excitement spread over the surface of
the brown and white mass, as if it were stretching its muscles in the
sunshine.  The panders tell the pilgrims that the sister of the Lord of
the World is coming: the pilgrims lift up their voices: the panders
join hands in worship: the pilgrims join theirs: the panders sprinkle
and fan the multitude, and its voice becomes the purr of one tremendous
tiger.

An hour passes, and Balarama arrives like Subhadra to take his seat.
Here and there a fainting woman is carried away.  The crowd talks
without pause.

It is not until high noon that the climax comes, when a shimmer of
white plumes and a waving of wild, braceleted arms heralds the entry of
the Lord of the World through the Lion Gate.  Now nothing can restrain
the crowd: the tiger rises, roars, lashes its tail, sweeps away the
roped-off enclosure and ramps over the cars.

In this welter it is hard to see Jaganath himself, but I catch a
glimpse of a painted mouth, a hooked nose, jewels.  A hundred
backward-moving priests precede him: a hundred bear his litter: a
thousand come behind.  For this occasion he has been provided with gold
hands and feet.  He has trumpeters and peacock fans and a Noble Guard,
like the Pope in Rome.  A Rajah, with jewelled broom, sweeps the ground
before him.  With each step of the bearers, Jaganath's shading fan
comes forward, as if keeping time to the cries of his people.  The sun
emerges to join in the rejoicing.

Jaganath is ready to begin his drive.

The British policeman takes his place in front of the car.  Jaganath
cannot be disregarded by the temporal power, for men and women still
sometimes throw themselves under his sixteen wheels, or fall in his
path in the confusion; also it is important that the car should be
pulled straight, for Jaganath is so holy that he cannot be moved
backwards, even an inch.  If he should slant across the square and butt
against a house, then the house must come down.  He may bring ruin as
well as redemption in his path.

Pilgrims fight and cluster round the ropes.  At the blast of a whistle,
the human horses pull, and the traces stretch and stretch, like pieces
of elastic.  The cottage shudders and seems about to tip forward, then
its wheels revolve.

Jaganath has begun his immemorial journey.  A group of priests are
dancing on the platform above the yellow coachman, gesticulating and
foaming at the mouth whilst the multitude prostrates itself in
adoration, or throws showers of marigold and jasmine and money upon the
holy car.  All over it, men, women and children are clinging and crying
and trampling and fainting; for Jaganath gives fertility to the barren,
heart's ease to the widow, sons and kine to the householder.  The sight
of him is bliss unimaginable.  He is Lord of the oldest living faith.

Slowly, slowly through his worshippers Jaganath goes forward, on such a
tide of faith and ecstasy as I may never again witness.

Near by, a temple elephant, with the eye of Siva drawn upon his gilded
forehead, is watching his hundredth procession.  Pilgrims salute him,
touching his trappings of cloth-of-gold and then their own foreheads.
They give him money, putting annas and even rupees into his trunk: he
swings the coins up lazily to a mahout who is almost as _blas_ as
himself.  Not quite, however, for his master has only seen the show
fifty times.

The elephant sways on his soft feet and blinks his small eyes, but not
cynically.  He seems to be wondering, as indeed I wonder also, why
these people, whose _rishis_ rejected idolatry several thousand years
ago, still bow down to Jaganath.

Neither he nor I can tell.  Hindu India flows by us, seething,
inscrutable, ecstatic, withdrawn into her sorceries, like Leonardo's
women.  We can only guess at what lies in her secret heart, and even to
guess wisely we must have an imagination that will stretch like the
ropes of Jaganath's car.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE TEMPLE OF THE UNDISTRACTED MIND

There came a night in Lucknow when I threw off my mess-dress, medals,
Wellington boots, and all my gear as a soldier, as if I could then and
there forget these toys and start afresh with new ones.  My time as a
"bear-leader" was over, and every fibre in me was in revolt against my
ghost-like existence as an officer of vanished Bengal Lancers.

The Colonel who commanded our amalgamation made no difficulty about my
taking ten days' leave to the hills.  There were three dozen officers
in our confluent regiments; certainly I could be spared.

Next day, Nairn Shah saw me off to Katgodam.  He knew this was the
beginning of the end of our happy life; and although he disapproved of
my cult of strange gods, at the back of his mind he held to a thought
which was too great to be uttered, but not difficult to guess for his
eyes roved often to a possession of mine which is the Afridi's god.  So
I gave him a promise, which I shall not particularise owing to the laws
about gun licences.

As I travelled towards the Himalayas, I looked out once more over the
great plains, which have seen so many conquerors, and say so little to
the unquiet West.

It was "cow-dust hour."  Ox-carts creaked slowly to a mud-walled
village.  Blue buffaloes browsed along in front of a naked pot-bellied
baby: black-buck bounded high, as if to see the train better: a
procession of peasants trailed out towards a shrine: a peacock preened
himself by a bamboo covert: men and beasts were gentle and well
content.  An infinite serenity lay under all that sky.

And as background to this pervasive peace, stood the Himalayas, white
and holy, their summits reaching into an after-glow of crimson.  Would
it be my work, I wondered, to tell the West a little of what may be
discovered there, and how Christ Himself threw the light of His
divinity upon the truths that were known in the childhood of the Vedas?
The task was broad and big as these plains I travelled, and my
equipment scanty.  Would anyone listen to the stammering of a soldier?


I knew little, then, except by instinct.  And to-day I have learned
only the extent of my ignorance, but I know that even that is worth
recording, for others will take up the tale.  There are philosophies in
India which the nations need, and my own country most of all, for her
destiny is bound up with the peoples who profess them.


I had heard that Bhagawan Sri was at Katgodam, preparing for his annual
pilgrimage to the Shaivite shrine of Amarnath, but when I arrived
there, I found that he had left the previous evening with two disciples.

Hoping to overtake him while still on the highways of civilisation, I
hired a car to drive me up to Naini Tal; and had hardly begun enquiring
for him in the rambling outskirts of the bazaar below the lake when I
saw his tall, loose-limbed, saffron-robed figure at a sweetmeat stall.
He was buying parched-barley for his bitch, who sat up and begged for
it.

"I have been longing for this moment," I said, as I clasped his hand.
"You seem younger, _guru-ji_, than when I saw you nine whole years ago."

"Age is nothing, Sahib.  I am happy, too.  We have been expecting you
for some time."

"Sivanand is with you?"

"Sivanand and his wife, Sahib.  They were married in Cashmere this
spring.  We three are going to Amarnath together."

"With me, I hope, and your dog?"

"Come weal or woe, I will never desert my faithful dog," he answered
promptly.  "Those were the words of Yudisthira on reaching heaven, and
I hope to be able to echo them when my time comes."

"And as to me?"

"I see signs that you have progressed in the Path," he answered.  "But
the journey is a far one."

"I wish I had progressed, _guru-ji_.  But while your disciples have
been engaged in worship and meditation, I have only been soldiering,
which is a waste of time.  Or isn't it?"

"You have passed your years of begging and meditation in a different
way from ours, that is all.  Tell me of the War."

"How can I talk about it, _guru-ji_, when I have so much to hear from
you?  Has Sivanand been initiated yet?  And who is his wife?"

"You will soon find out, Sahib!  You and I have all eternity before us,
just as Sivanand and Hastini have all eternity in which to study the
mysteries of love and devotion.  You remember Hastini--who brought you
to me?"

"The girl with the limp?"

"Yes.  She has become rich in worldly possessions.  But they will tell
you their story, and you must tell me yours while we walk to the place
where we are staying, over there on the terrace by the single tree.  Is
that a wound on your right arm?"

"It is only a polo accident, _guru-ji_.  The War left no outer marks."

"But it made you suffer?  Tell me."

His voice was smooth, but I felt that he commanded.  There was a core
of steel in that benign body.

As we strolled through the bazaar, and on by a mountain path which led
away from the lake and upwards to the charcoal-burner's hut at which
they had halted, I spoke easily to him of many things which I found it
impossible to say to others, for there was a stillness in his mind
which drew me out.  He seemed to understand everything, and to
understand in three dimensions.  When I told him of my walk from
Winchester to Twyford, for instance, he gauged both my physical and
mental states, and saw beyond them to larger questions.

"It is good to love your country," he said, surprisingly, "for war is a
disease which patriotism can cure."

"Yet patriotism may lead to terrible conflicts?"

"It may, but it need not.  If it does, it is better so.  Last year
eight millions of us died by influenza.  That also is nothing.  Siva
must take his toll until men know him for what he is.  The worst enemy
is not death, but wrong desire.  Wars are fevers, mass-perversions of
the sexual instinct.  They come as a fever does, when disease is
present; and do good like a fever.  The alternative to a fever, when
you are diseased, is death.  But it is better not to have the disease
or the fever, but to love.  It is better if your heart is pure."

"A national as well as a personal Yoga?"

"There is no difference, Sahib.  A body whose units are in harmony is
at peace with all the world."

"But how can there be peace when conflict is a law of Nature?  Nature
is ugly, _guru-ji_.  She makes the turtles eat the dead in the Ganges,
and plans the unpleasant fate of various insects, as well as that of
humanity.  I know your Siva and his Kali now: I first saw her when I
had sunstroke, years ago; and again when I killed a favourite horse;
and I saw her gloating in the deserts of Mesopotamia.  For these last
four years she has been dancing on the body of her husband with her
girdle of dead hands and bloody breasts, so that the whole earth
trembles."

The _guru's_ small bright eyes wrinkled in laughter.

"You have seen much and learned much during these years, Sahib," he
said, "but you have not learned to love.  And love, you know, is the
first as well as the last virtue of the Path."

"Can it be taught?"

"You must first learn indifference, Sahib, for love can only come into
stillness.  You must make a void and then let love flood in from its
infinite source.  But Sivanand and Hastini will tell you of these
things better than I, for they are studying them.  Moreover, I must go
down the valley, to bathe before the evening meal."

Not one word would he say as to my discipleship.  Our talk plunged
about like a restive horse, without advancing in any direction; yet it
occurred to me now that we had reached the hut, that perhaps he had
been the rider and I the steed, and that I was being guided.

The _cheelas_ welcomed us with open arms and cries of "Ram!  Ram!"
While the _guru_ gathered his brass vessels for washing and drinking,
Sivanand and Hastini spread a blanket for me between themselves, and
offered me warm milk.  Sivanand was the same as he had been at Agra,
except that his ropy locks were brushed and parted in the middle, as a
sign, perhaps, that he had received the _diksha_[1] which ended his
time of wandering.  As to Hastini, she seemed to me to be more tidied
and more mundane than I remembered her.  She wore the saffron robe of a
Yogi, like Sivanand, but hers was of silk, and was adorned with a
turquoise necklace.  A diamond shone in each ear, setting off the
glossy black of her short hair, and her caressing eyes.

She told me that she had inherited six villages near Patna on the death
of an uncle, and that the Bhagawan Sri had advised her to settle down
and administer her inheritance, but that she had begged first to be
allowed to visit an ashram kept by the Maharajah of Cashmere, and that
there she had met Sivanand; and she told me also of how Sivanand had
led her round the sacred marriage fire, and of the lilies on the Dal
Lake, and of the garden of Shalimar, and of devil-dancers, and red-cap
lamas, and the glittering icicle of Siva in the cave they were to
visit....

She talked without pause, simply and smoothly; while I listened with
half my mind, and wondered with the other half whether this was really
the girl who had stumbled along with me, almost sullenly, towards the
Dasaswamedh Ghat.

"And you"--she asked, having exhausted her news--"are you married,
Sahib?"

"No, and I don't expect to be," I answered.

"You don't want to have a son to send your spirit on its last journey!
I am sorry, Sahib."

When Bhagawan Sri returned, he said in his dry way that I was right not
to undertake the duties of a householder, for I was a seeker after the
wisdom of the ages.  Domestic bliss was not for the _brahmacharin_.
They must instruct me in higher matters, he said, such as the mysteries
of Being and Not-being and the methods by which the illumined Self may
taste the nectar of Attributeless Brahman.

"But what can we teach him while you are here?" protested Hastini.

"I shall not be here," said the _guru_.  "Look at the little Western
god, on your left wrist, Sahib, and tell me what it says."

"Five-thirty, _guru-ji_!"

"In two hours it will be nearly sunset.  Until the shadows lengthen I
shall meditate.  I am an old man with nothing to say, but you three are
young, and can edify yourselves by discussing the quintessence of the
Vedanta."

Hastini clapped her hands.

"I understand, _guru-ji_, for you did the same with me!  When you are
ready," she explained to me, "he will teach you more in five minutes
than we can tell you in five years, but not till then.  Meanwhile, what
shall we talk about?"

"There are so many things----"

"The Sahib is _stiff_!" said Sivanand suddenly.

"Perhaps he doesn't cry and laugh enough," suggested Hastini.  "It must
be stifling to wear an English mask."

"As to that," I answered, "you know what it is to be shy yourself, I
think."

"Indeed I do," she admitted.

Silence fell between us, and the two watched me curiously.

The _guru_, meanwhile, had spread his antelope skin under the single
tree.  Completely enfolded in his robe, with back and neck as straight
as the fir under which he sat, he looked out with unwinking eyes over
the mountains where the Vedas were revealed.

Sivanand stretched himself, and lit a cigarette.

"Have you ever tried to calm your mind, Sahib?"

"Of course."

"And how?"

"By relaxing, and--being calm."

"You cannot control thought by thinking.  The lungs are the keys to the
treasuries of vision.  Let us be practical, and talk of that excellent
path to peace."

"By all means.  And you shall judge for yourself whether or not I have
already taken some steps along the road."

"Show me," said Sivanand.

I showed him the _bhastrika_ then, as I had practised it in Turkey, but
he told me that I had only been wasting my time.

"You will become more flexible with practice," he said.  "Your ribs are
like an old cask at present.  They should be like young branches.  Even
your tail-bones should move, and your skin should grow luminous and the
vital force should tingle at your finger-tips when the lotuses of your
body are fully opened."

"Your words slip through my mind, Sivanand.  All I know is that this
breathing makes me giddy."

"Your heart was not pure if it made you giddy.  The life of the body is
the blood.  The life of the blood is the Spirit.  The life of the
Spirit is God.  God is Spirit.  You cannot know Him through the brain,
but through the purified and exalted body.  As food is turned by the
body into blood, and the seed into life, so by the transmutation of
divine energy are ideas born.  This is a hard saying, even for the
gods, and may only be known through purification and active prayer,
including _asana_ and _mudra_.[2]  You will never understand your Self,
or the Creation of which you are a part, as long as you separate it
into pieces.  Every attribute of the Universe is in your mind.  Every
quality of your mind--stiffness, strength, fear, joy--is reflected in
your body, somewhere, somehow."

"A child can perform every _asana_ with ease," added Hastini, "and many
of the _mudras_, but not an adult.  The seeds of death begin in the
joints, and to free them means pain.  I know, for I began Yoga only
when I was twenty, after a fever in which I would have died but for
Bhagawan Sri, and I had almost to break my ankles in order to acquire
the lotus seat.  For you it will also be difficult."

"And what shall I gain if I do these things?" I asked.

"The right to breathe," she said solemnly, "and therefore a mind at
peace, for, as Sivanand says, the breath and brain are linked.  You
cannot think deep thoughts with shallow lungs and you cannot absorb
_prana_[3] through a poisoned body.  Hence the necessary purifications.
Bliss really begins with the bowels.  The _Tantra Sanhita_ has a
_dhauti_[4] in which the worshipper stands navel deep in water and
draws out his long intestine.  That is not possible for you.  But you
can fill it with a gallon of tepid water.  Then you must learn to drink
water through the nose and expel it through the mouth, and drink it
through the mouth and expel it through the nose[5]; and the
purification of the heart by vomiting,[6] and the ventilation of the
alimentary canal by means of the crow-bill pout."[7]

Then, seeing I was puzzled, she continued:

"These things must be learned from a teacher, as also the postures and
exercises which force the evil humours from the joints, and enable the
seeker after knowledge to concentrate the currents of his body."

"It seems to me you think too much about the body."

"When its gross elements are vivified, Sahib," she answered, "you will
understand, but that can only come with practice."

"I think I had better begin now!"

Hastini was utterly in earnest, and took me at my word.

"Begin, then," she said, "by inhaling the beauty of the world: the
individuality that the new-born child proclaims with its first cry: the
fragrance of the gardens of Shalimar: or the stuff that God gave to
your nostrils to make you a living soul, if you like.  It is all the
same _prana_.  Receive it thankfully and humbly.  Do not expect to
absorb more of it than you are ready to build with.  There is no
greater sin than pride, and no greater friend than breath: its
inspiration, retention and exhalation is your life, and all life;
through it you shall know the truth of Sivagama's words: 'There is
nothing, O Lotus-faced goddess, beyond the breath.'  Sivanand will show
you, and you can copy him."

Sivanand made me place one hand at his navel and the other at the small
of his back.  Then he swelled himself with air and collapsed himself
with rhythmic speed, each inhalation seeming like a light hammer-tap.
Finally, with breath retained and eyes upturned, he remained still, yet
strangely vibrant.  Through this hidden energy I drew through him a
sense of power, not directly derived from his physical envelope, but
coming, perhaps, from all thought in all worlds.  I saw distant minds
and the souls of the dead, and reached out to them with the fingers of
spirit, but grasped only air: I could not enter them.

"Once a _guru_ was able to possess himself of the mind and body of a
Queen of Benares by this power of _prana_, so that he became the Queen
herself," said Sivanand.  "But the control of such forces is very
difficult.  The _bhastrika_ is first of all a cleansing breath.  Beyond
that you need not look.  During the inward breath, imagine that you are
absorbing some portion of the Cosmic Consciousness.  During the outward
breath, send your spirit out to the four corners of the earth.  And
during the holding of the breath, listen attentively to the life
within.  In that stillness the five illusions fade in the knowledge of
Siva, and Reality is seen as a candle in a windless place.  The flame
is in every heart, but it cannot shine amidst confusions of desire."

Three times I took twenty-one breaths and held my breath.

The first time I felt as if something had caught me by the throat.

The second time I again felt suffocated, but knew that _prana_ was
mobilising the armies of the blood and forcing its way through the
barriers of the body.  There was a struggle between opposing forces, a
descent into hell, a search of Orpheus for his bride; then so-called
mind asserted its dominion over so-called matter, light replaced
darkness and my stimulated blood-stream flooded through every cell.  I
felt buoyant and calm and intuitively aware.

The third time, a sense of ease and equipoise almost instantly replaced
the initial struggle, and with this physical balancing came an
apprehension untellable.  With my Angel I took wings of wonder and
traversed continents and worlds, and seemed to reach the last stars,
beyond thinking, where mind is not, and where that nothing out of which
came something seems almost clutchable.

"If you practise this restraint three times a day for six months at
regular hours," said Sivanand, "you may begin to obtain results."

"Results?"

"Sounds: they will be but your own blood in your arteries.  Sights:
images in your own retina if you care to separate them from other
illusions.  Sensations: the quivering of _Kundalini_ in the spine, if
you so imagine it.  But if I tell you what to expect, what you expect
will come to pass, but not in its natural order.  You must have
confidence.  Open your heart and lungs to the source of life and
_prana_ will work for you.  Remember that the purpose of all
_pranayama_--and this is a truth on which you must ponder--is to make
the breath come slowly and slowly.  When its inspiration and expiration
are exactly balanced, you will have peace of mind, whether you know it
or not."

Bhagawan Sri, I remembered, had told me the same at Benares.  What was
he doing now, I wondered, so aloof and still?

An hour and a half had passed, and still he remained immobile,
unseeing, as if carved against a red sky.  Sivanand guessed my thought.

"We could not disturb him, even if we would, Sahib, for he is rapt.
But let us go to him, for he would not have meditated like this in the
open unless he had desired you to see him."

We went to the place where he sat, followed by the terrier, growling.

"Touch him," said Sivanand, "and you will see that he is cold.  He is
with his _shakti_, in the isolation of bliss.  He has drawn _Kundalini_
upwards so that all life has left his body except in one place.  The
thousand-petalled jewel of the lotus glows.  There only his life burns
in one fiery point."

I hesitated, but the _cheelas_ made me put my hand on his ankles and
his neck.  They were icy-cold.  His eyes were turned upwards into his
skull.  He did not seem to breathe.  To all intents and purposes he was
dead, except that the extreme top of his head was hot.

"Do not be alarmed, Sahib," said Hastini.  "He can recall _Kundalini_
at will."

"You are sure that he can come back?"

"He will bring _Kundalini_ down at nightfall," said Hastini.  "Come,
Sahib, you are cold."

She drew her arm through mine, and we returned to the hut.  The glow of
her body warmed me through and through.

A curious comprehension seemed to link us, but whatever this
understanding was, she was its mistress as she was its begetter: she
could make me burn or freeze, but I did not feel that I had any effect
on her.

She began to speak of that serpent-lore of the Tantriks which is at
once so mystical and so material that it baffles the Western mind.

"The goddess is more subtle than the fibre of the lotus," she said,
"and lies asleep at the base of the spine, curled three-and-a-half
times round Herself, closing with Her body the door of Brahman.
Sometimes She awakes of Her own volition, which you call falling in
love.  Falling in love!  Yes, like slipping on a mango skin.  The right
way to arouse Her is through breathing.  Then you do not fall, but rise
into love.  Then She uncoils Herself, and raises Her head, and enters
the royal road of the spine, piercing the mystic centres, until She
reaches the brain.  These things are not to be understood in a day.
When She reaches the thousand-petalled jewel of the lotus, then the Sun
at the navel meets the Moon at the throat, and you taste Her nectar,
and know that She is Life, and that Life is God."

Hastini held me as if I had been entranced.  I could not take my eyes
from hers: they were my gates of pearl.

One can, if one will, describe what happens when four hands meet.  One
can, if one will, describe the sudden understanding between a man and
woman, the conflagrant moment when two Selves come into the sunlight of
unity, knowing each other.  But there are moments stranger still, which
no tongue can tell, or pen write, when nothing happens on the physical
plane, unless the eyes between themselves spin some etheric web in
which something dances, like the sex-chromosomes in the womb.  It is
not in the body alone that a child is born.  Every woman carries within
her another seed: she is the begetter of more than bodies.  That which
was born between Hastini and I that night still lives, and can
therefore reproduce its kind, but what and where it is I cannot say.

      ***      ***      ***      ***

When the _guru_ returned, he joined in our conversation as if he had
never left us.  I did ask him about his trance, for the talk still ran
on the mysteries of love and devotion, and Bhagawan Sri was disposed to
listen to his _cheelas_.  "Sivanand and I have renounced even the
Veda."  Hastini was saying: "We are crossing the ocean of Maya, and we
do not know what we shall find on its farther shore.  But after all
this is the playtime of the spirit that cannot always live in one room,
nor always fix its thoughts on eternity."

"The wife and the mother is the sole and sacred path," said Bhagawan
Sri, quoting a text.  "In her you shall be born again."

Hastini considered this a moment, and added a saying of Bhartihari's:

"'The true object of love is the union of the hearts of the
participants.  When that is not accomplished, the mating might be that
of two corpses.'"

"Through breathing you shall come to Layasiddhi," said Bhagawan Sri,
"as through walking you reach a place of pilgrimage.  Sivanand will
find Her who is his hidden half, and you, Hastini, Him.  The true
knowledge of Being comes out of the masculine awakening in woman, and
the feminine in man, which is manifested on the earth-plane as sexual
union.  In that super-sensual bliss the rock of egoism is riven, and
the two become One, and Very God."

"And then, after a long time," said Sivanand, "when we see the children
of our children, we shall abandon all food taken in towns and take
refuge in a lonely forest.  And so we shall have escaped from the net
of desire, although still together, and Siva shall be seen by us in his
true aspect."

"Instead of as Kali," I said, "who dances upon the body of her husband?"

"Yes, Sahib, instead of in the _mayik_ form necessary for creation.
Every instant upon this earth there is a great out-pouring of
fertility.  Every second a new-born child is somewhere crying, and
somewhere another soul is leaving the skull it inhabits.  These changes
pertain to _maya_; their perception is the higher wisdom.  There are a
million lives in Sivanand, waiting to meet Hastini's.  Their wills
shall choose them, by a knowledge and control of their dual natures
which is the microcosm of the world-process between Siva and his
_shakti_."

Again I suspected, but I think now wrongly, that Bhagawan Sri was not
being as explicit as he might have been.

We ate a few mangoes and drank a little milk.  We looked up to the
stars, and warmed ourselves at our fire.  Sivanand smoked incessantly.

"I have found clues, _guru-ji_, to some of the things which I have been
seeking," I said at last, "but there is one of my questions which you
have avoided.  To-morrow I shall know the answer; so why not tell me
now whether I may come to Amarnath?"

The _guru_ took a piece of biscuit and showed it to his terrier, who
jumped round him expectantly.  When he tossed it up, she caught it in
mid-air.

"Look at that for concentration!" he said.  "That is the quality of
_ekagrata_, the faculty of sinking the mind in space, as a lover into
the arms of his adored."

"You will not take me?"

"The bee buzzes when it is outside the flower," said Bhagawan Sri, "but
within the chalice it drinks honey silently.  In the West you may find
a _guru_ who knows the skilful management of your times and values, to
lead you to the threshold of the temple of the undistracted mind."

I swallowed my disappointment.  In the light of the embers over which
we crouched, I could see Hastini's eyes, narrowed, observant, like a
line of black bees in a summer sky.

We talked far into the night, of many things of both East and West; and
I knew that I was receiving a lesson in that virtue of the Path which
complements love.

We spoke of the teachings of Christianity in regard to death (the
_guru_ considered that we sometimes relinquished this life with an
unseemly struggle); and of the connexion between modern mathematics and
the word _iva_--relativity--so constantly appearing in the Vedas; and
again of breathings such as the _brahmarai_,[8] and the _sitali_,[9]
and the one-four-two rhythm, by which the mind may pass behind the
lights and shadows of the phenomenal world.

"How may the knower cut the knot of appearances with a knife of grey
pulp?" said Sivanand.  "A knock against the hard facts of existence may
blunt the brain: too much sleep may rust it: too little sleep may make
it as brittle as a dry twig.  Then snap--you cannot know Reality until
your next incarnation!"

Presently I lay down, telling myself I could listen better like that.

"Your civilisation has done marvellous things," he continued, sucking
at the cup of his hands in which a cigarette burned, so that he drew in
lungfuls of mixed smoke and air.  "You have almost conquered the earth.
With your telescopes and trains and battleships you can move and
control almost everything, except your thoughts, and the food in your
bowels....  You look outwards too much.  Our methods are more
reasonable.  We do not bother about engines.  The _shakti-nadi_ is a
more important machine."


I rose, startled.  Sivanand was still speaking, but in another tone.

"As the dew is dried by the morning light," he was saying, "so are the
sins of mankind dispersed by the glories of Himalaya."

Then Hastini capped him with: "He who has seen Himalaya is greater than
he who has performed all the worships of Kashi."


Hours had passed, and although it was not yet dawn, its foreglow had
already lit three hundred miles of snow before me, remote, and plumed
with storms that never cease; yet in appearance so close and so quiet
that it seemed to me that I might stroll there in an hour or two, and
bask in a white peace.

The three now sat silent, with the old bitch at my _guru's_ feet,
looking over those titanic masses that have given India her fertility
and her faith.  In the increasing light, the clouds above them took the
shape of beasts.  A dragon pounced on the mountains of Nepal, a lizard
with eyes of flame devoured a fly upon Nanda Devi, a sprawling giantess
stretched her length from Trisul to Diwalghiri and searched the valleys
with a luminous rapier.

Surya had begun the skyey chase that never ends.  For all his pains he
can do no more than touch the hem of the twilight maid, and gather the
roses of morning that she scatters.  Yet it is for her that the world
is lit.  But for her, flowers would not open, nor man walk the earth.
But for her darkness, there would be no light.

The old mountains looked indulgently on the five of us who faced the
shrines of Aryavarta.  Buddhas and birds and butterflies and trees were
one to them.  The world was still young, and full of a blossoming and a
fluttering and a search for things unfindable.

The sun lit up the yellow robes of my friends, and their lips moved,
but I heard no sound, for the Gayatri is very sacred:

OM TAT SAVITUR VARENYAM BHARGO DEVASYA DIMOHI DHIYO YO NAH PRACHODAYAT
OM.

_O face of the True Sun, now hidden by a disc of gold, may we know Thy
Reality, and do our whole duty on our journey to Thy Light_.[10]

"Guru-ji, when may I say that prayer?"

"Soon or late you will be one of us, for there is that within a man
which is stronger than any outer circumstance.  When you have learned
more of the breath which is a reflex of the Great Breath, you will
notice the tricks time plays on man, and know that it is not within the
frame of our measurements."

"In this dawn I am aware of that!"

"You have begun to be aware of love.  But mortal mind cannot know its
heights and depths.  In the Upanishads it is written that in the
beginning nor time nor change, nor speech, nor shape, nor Aught, nor
Naught, existed.  Love came to this emptiness as the in-drawn breath of
cosmos, and out of it the worlds were made.  Nature and Will were
formed then and both are bound by Love, so that the three are one.
Every religion in the world says this, and I have studied them all!"

The words rang true.  In his mind, so resilient and so sane, were
faiths flooded over by the sands of Atlantis and Chaldea; the Vaishna
trident and the Shaivite eye were there; the seal of twi-sexed Hermes,
the vulture cap of Isis, the serpent-circled rod, the Crescent and the
Cross.  And as all colours mingle and merge in sunlight, so in him the
blending of these beliefs showed forth love.



[1] Initiation.

[2] Posture and exercise.

[3] Air, which the Hindus have always held to be something more than a
mixture of gases.

[4] Purification.

[5] _Vayut Krama_ and _s'it Krama_.

[6] _Hrid-dhauti_ by _vamana_.

[7] _Vatasara-dhauti_ by _Kakini-mudra_.

[8] A droning sound.

[9] A serpent-hiss.

[10] This is what I understand the Gayatri to mean: the literal
translation is "Let us contemplate that glorious Light of the divine
Savitur: may He inspire our minds."




THE END




APPENDIX

The word Yoga comes from root _yug_, meaning to join: it signifies the
union of the body of the disciple with the visible world, and of his
spirit with cosmic consciousness.  Further, Yoga has the sense of a
yoke, or discipline, which the student must undergo in order to reach
happiness and heaven.

Yoga, as I know it, is monistic.  "All that exists is one, though sages
call it by different names."  Many centuries after these Vedic words
were written St. Athanasius was made responsible for the idea that:
"the reasonable soul and flesh is one man.  One, not by conversion of
the God-head into flesh; but by taking of the manhood into God; one
altogether, not by confusion of substance: but by unity of person."

There is no notion in Yoga, as I know it, of a divinity disjunct from
the Self, no doctrine of a Creator ruling His Universe from an outside
heaven.  Such a possibility may be admitted or implied in some Hindu
scriptures, but my _guru_, at any rate, concerned himself entirely with
Man and his Becoming.

Yoga is the study of You.

The body of the Yogi is the universe.  It is not, however, either so
material or so metaphysical a body as is commonly believed; but the
whole subject is so enmeshed in prejudice, misunderstanding, and
unfamiliar Sanskrit terms that I despair of condensing into a few
thousand words what Arthur Avalon and Professor Radha Krishnan have
discussed brilliantly--in many volumes.

I take courage, however, from the fact that the knowledge of the Vedas
is beginning to spread in Europe.  "In the whole world there is no
study so beneficial or so elevating," said Schopenhauer, adding that
"the Vedas have been the solace of my life: they will be the solace of
my death."  On this Max Mller observed that "if the words of
Schopenhauer required any endorsement from me I would willingly give it
as the result of my own experiences during a long life devoted to the
study of many philosophies and many religions.  If by philosophy is
meant a preparation for a happy death, I know no preparation better
than the philosophy of the Vedas.  The early Indians possessed a
knowledge of the true God.  All their writings are replete with
sentiments and expressions that are noble, clear and severely grand.
Not to know what the Vedas have already done in illuminating the
darkest passages of the human mind--of that mind on which we ourselves
are feeding and living--is a misfortune."  Two modern authorities (Sir
John Woodroffe and M. Maeterlinck) support these statements.  The
former, in _The World as Power-Reality_, claims that "an examination of
Indian Vedic doctrine shows that it is, in important respects, in
conformity with the most advanced scientific and philosophic thought of
the West, and that when this is not so, it is science which will go to
the Vedanta and not the reverse"; while M. Maeterlinck, in _La Grande
Ferie_, writing of the problems of time and space, says: "Seule, 
l'origine des ges, l'antique religion de l'Inde wut l'intuition de ces
gigantesques et insolubles problmes.  Elle regardait l'univers en
mouvement comme une illusion qui apparait ou disparait selon un rhythme
sans fin que scandent le sommeil et le reveil de la Cause Eternelle....
N'est-ce pas dans cette voie que marche notre science?"


But Hindu philosophy will require many more libraries and
expositors--say another thousand man-years of work--before it is
rightly valued in the West.  A system whose scriptures number five
hundred volumes and go back five thousand years cannot be understood in
a day, or even in a generation.  To sift and refine, to analyse and
compare, will be a labour in which the exact scholarship of Europe and
America may co-operate with the intuitive feeling-realisation of the
race to whom the Vedas belong.  Already the University of Oxford has
published some forty translations of Sanskrit texts.  Harvard has
published twenty-six texts, and Johns Hopkins the whole of the Atharva
Veda, but there are many more books that await translation, and even
discovery, for some of the Tantrik scriptures have been hidden away.

Further, there is an immense exegesis in Sanskrit, German, French and
English; and, incomparably more important than all else, there still
exists a living tradition of Vedic culture by the banks of the Ganges.
The Brahmins of to-day, like their ancestors, have a great appetite for
abstractions: they have always discussed everything and tried
everything of which man has ever thought.  In a material sense this has
perhaps been their undoing, but it has also been a source of inner
strength.  No other race has delved so deep into the Unconscious.  And
no other race has survived so long in racial purity.  Theirs is the
most ancient civilisation on earth.  Benares was a venerable town when
London and Paris were villages.  Down the centuries the Brahmins have
carried the torch of the Vedas above the heads of the crowd, and they
are rightly proud of the light it has given the world.

But with Hindu philosophy as a whole I am only indirectly concerned.  I
have no knowledge of the meditational environments of the _ashrams_ and
monasteries of Asia.  There is only one branch of Yoga which I have
experienced in my bones and breathing, and that a very practical one,
which would be well adapted to meet the increasing nervous strain of
modern life.

The Hindus have never held that matter is some inert outside substance.
It is a commonplace with them that the body is an aspect of the mind.
God is life.  Life is God.  Yoga is an orderly and objective process of
self-realisation; the handmaid of religion, not a religion in itself.
It has nothing to do with mystery and Mahatmas.

Moreover, there is more than one Yoga.  Here are six, which I have set
down as a concession to our Western love for classification:

1. _Mantra Yoga_, or the science of vibrations;

2. _Gnana Yoga_, in which the intellect is invoked to obtain a
knowledge of heaven;

3. _Bhakti Yoga_, where the disciple finds "paradise here in this body
pent" by means of love and devotion;

4. _Karma Yoga_, which is the philosophy of work and the attainment of
happiness through action;

5. _Raja Yoga_, which aims at a synthesis _Gnana, Karma_ and _Bhakti_
Yoga by service and self-sacrifice in the management of worldly affairs;

And 6. _Hatha_ or _Gathastha Yoga_, with which I have been chiefly
concerned, and which seeks in its early stages to awaken the sleeping
serpent of _Kundalini_, or vitality, by a physiological psychology.

But there is no real dividing line between these Yogas nor between the
eight stages (corresponding to the Buddhist's "noble eight-fold path")
into which every one of them is divided.  These stages are:

1. Right thought, or _yama-niyama_, meaning literally "death-not
death."  The pundit at Delhi gave me a list of these preliminary
virtues, which includes the moralities of all religions.

2. _Asana_, or right positions.  These relate to the balance and
posture of the body.  Buddha, for instance, is generally represented
with his right foot on his left thigh and his left foot on his right,
in what is known as the lotus seat, which has as definite an effect on
the mind as has the Christian _asana_ of kneeling in prayer.

3. _Mudra_ consists of exercises and gestures, including the
_dhauties_, or purifications, or baptisms.

4. _Pranayama_ is the study of the various rhythms of breathing.  It
cannot be undertaken until both mind and body have been rendered supple
and pure by previous exercises.

The four succeeding stages are: 5. _Pratyahara_, 6. _Dharana_, 7.
_Dhyana_, and 8. _Samadhi_.  These steps are described at great length
in some English works on Yoga, but the true teaching never will and
never can be put in print, being personal and infinitely flexible.  All
that is written in Sanskrit concerning it is in the nature of notes or
outlines to enable the _guru_ to pass on the teaching to his _cheela_
in the accustomed order.  Roughly, _pratyahara_ is nerve control;
_dharana_, mind control; _dhyana_, meditation; _samadhi_, bliss,
isolation, emancipation, ecstasy.  The Jesuits, whose exercises Loyola
may have borrowed from Moorish mysticism, possess the nearest approach
to _dhyana_ in the West.

Before the fourth stage can be entered upon (_pranayama_) three
baptisms are necessary; by water, fire and the Holy Ghost.  Baptism by
water is of the skin, teeth, nasal passages and lower bowel.
Purification by fire is concerned with control of the digestive
system--for an active metabolism is considered in Yoga as a function of
purity.  Finally the sloughing of the shell of egoism, the preparation
of the mind for the illumination of the Spirit, is a combination of
exercises for the cerebro-spinal and sympathetic nervous systems
together with an individual course of character-training under the
_guru_.  Hot baths and white linen will not of themselves make us
clean; nor sexual repressions.  The Eastern purity is more thorough
than ours, and insists on an elimination of poisons of the intestinal
tract, a proper digestion of food, and a riddance of the lumber of
thwarted will and unsatisfied desire that hamper the brain.

Here in the West we make an exact science of medicine and are inclined
to consider religion as something rather esoteric; the Brahmins, on the
contrary, see in our body a mystical microcosm of the Universe, and in
ideas about God only a formal and rather sterile intellectual exercise.
A balance between these views would certainly contribute to the
advancement of knowledge and be of benefit to both races.  The Hindus,
as I think they would themselves admit, should come closer to certain
practical realities; as to ourselves, if we studied the mystical
phenomena of India, we might well discover facts of importance not only
to Harley Street, but to Christendom.

I am a Christian myself, and it seems to me clear that Christ based his
teaching on a tradition existing in His time and country, and that that
tradition originally came from India, and is still being followed
there, passing from father to son, from _guru_ to _cheela_, with some
accretions and superstitions perhaps, yet still one of the most ancient
of languages "in which men have spoken of their God."

Consider, for instance, the healing miracles of Christ from the
standpoint of the aphorisms of Patanjali.  In the vivid and mysterious
11th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, the disciple whom
Jesus loved would appear to have been prepared for an ancient exercise,
no doubt practised by the Essenes of that time as it is by the Copts
to-day, and known in India as the _Kali-mudra_.[1]

This _Kali-mudra_ is a self-induced trance which is only entered into
by the aptest pupils of a great teacher, and then only after
preparation and purification, for it is dangerous, and success in it is
proof that the student can transcend the limitations of time in his own
flesh.  Quite properly, such powers were kept secret in past ages.
Even to-day they are not for the crowd, but if they do exist (and I
know that they are still being practised) then I think that knowledge
of them would elucidate certain incidents in the life of the Founder of
our Faith.

There is nothing in the following "reconstruction" of the story of
Lazarus that need strain our sense of probability.

First, then, let us assume, as we surely may, that the mysteries of the
Kingdom of Heaven were given to some and not to others of those whom
Christ taught.  Between Jesus and the Little Eleazer (Lazarus is an
affectionate diminutive; moreover he was unmarried, which again points
to discipleship) there existed some special bond which may well have
been that of master to initiate.

Lazarus stopped breathing.  His heart-beat could not be felt.
Naturally his sisters thought that he was dead and sent word to Jesus,
their friend.

What did Jesus do?  Hurry to the house that had so often sheltered Him
and help the boy to whom He had given His divine love?  On the
contrary, He said that the sickness was "not unto death, but for the
glory of God"--words which seem to indicate that Lazarus was undergoing
a step in his training which the Master did not wish to interrupt.

The disciples come to the Master and say that if Lazarus is only asleep
"he will do well."  There is no reason, they add, to risk the danger of
a journey into Judea.

Two days pass.  Lazarus has not yet awakened from his trance and is now
in danger.

Then Jesus says to his disciples plainly, "Lazarus is dead."

To all intents and purposes Lazarus is dead, for unless the Master
raises him, the ordeal will end in tragedy.  First Jesus says that the
sleep is not unto death and two days later that the sleeper is dead:
how better are we to account for the apparent contradiction in Christ's
words than by the hypothesis that Lazarus has been in a trance?  No
other explanation, it seems to me, will square with all the facts given
in the Fourth Gospel.

Jesus comes to Bethany and finds that His disciple has been in the
grave for four days.  Martha says, "Lord, if Thou hadst been here my
brother had not died."  True, Lazarus would not have died.  But each
soul must go out alone to meet its God: the divine arms can only help
it after it has tried to walk.

The terrible moment of His tears and groaning as He draws near the tomb
is now understandable (indeed it is suffused with new light) if we
accept this theory.  The one being who could have understood the hidden
side of His teaching and might therefore have given Him a human
sympathy, has been unable, through bodily weakness, to carry the burden
of the knowledge given.  Amongst these folk Jesus feels himself
surrounded by love, but not by comprehension.  Lazarus knew a little
more than they, but less than He had hoped.  A friend has failed him,
not for the first or last time.

When the stone is about to be removed, Martha says that the body will
stink.  So it would have in that climate; but Yogis have been known to
remain as long as forty days in _Kali-mudra_.

They take away the stone.  Jesus lifts up His eyes and says: "Father, I
thank Thee that Thou hast heard Me."  Then he calls Lazarus in a loud
voice (or a "piercing" voice, for the dearly-loved voice of the Master
must reach a numbed consciousness) and the soul of the disciple is
brought back from the borderland where it hovers.

Christ speaks and there is life.



[1] Literally, "death-gesture."




[End of Bengal Lancer, by F. Yeats-Brown]
