[Illustration: Decoration]
ALL night long the Jumna purred in their ears, rolling over the stones
at the bottom of the shady hill, whereon the Raj had built a travellers’
rest. Looking out through the dewy branches in the morning, they saw the
Doon lying under its mists at their feet, with the ragged Siwalliks on
the other side—already they had begun to climb. Already, too, there was
the mountain scent in the air—that smell of wet mossy rock and ferns and
running streams and vigour—and this, as they set forth upon the
Himalayas, with their faces turned upwards, took possession of their
senses and made them altogether joyous. The Rajpore charger sniffed the
wind with his Roman nose as copiously as circumstances would permit, and
snapped viciously at young Browne’s trousers with his retreating
under-lip. The Rajpore charger must have been at least twelve hands
high, and fat out of all proportion. His syce and proprietor,
Boophal—probably thirteen years old, wearing a ragged cloth jacket, a
dhoty, and an expression of precocious iniquity, was very proud of him.
The syce attached to Helen’s pony was visibly abased by the contrast,
and Helen herself declared loudly against the injustice of being
expected to keep up under the circumstances. Mrs. Browne’s mount had
only one idea of going, and that was to imitate the gait of her
distinguished friend in front at a considerable distance to the rear;
and there is no doubt that it must have been trying invariably to come
up puffing, to the reproaches of a waiting lord, complacent in his
saddle. “If you could ride behind for awhile and beat it,” suggested
Helen; “it doesn’t seem to mind me.” But young Browne thought that was
quite impossible. There was one thing they _might_ do, though—at Saia
they might get her a spur! “George!” cried she, “do you think I would
use a spur?—horrid, cruel thing, that you never can tell when it’s going
in!” with ungrammatical emotion. “But we might change ponies for a bit,
if you like.”
“We might,” said young Browne, reflectively, “but I don’t think that I
should feel justified in putting you on this one, my dear; his rage and
fury with his nose are awful.”
“But, George, I should like to ride _beside_ you!”
“Not more than I should like to have you, dear. But I think, since I
can’t have that pleasure, what a satisfaction I take in the knowledge
that you are _safe_. Do you feel disposed to trot?”
“_I_ do,” returned Mrs. Browne, with plaintive emphasis; “but you’ll
have to start, please. What is the matter with this animal?”
The Diagram was neighing—long, shrill neighs of presagement, with her
ears cocked forward. “Something’s coming,” said young Browne.
“_Dâk-wallahata!_”[137] remarked Boophal. A faint jingling on the far
side of the nearest curve; the dâk-wallah had rounded it, and was upon
them, at a short, steady, unrelenting trot. The dâk-wallah, all in
khaki, had charge of Her Majesty’s mails. There was no time for a
salaam. He wore bells at his waist for premonition, and a spear over his
shoulder for defence. These hills were full of _janwas_[138] without
special respect for Her Majesty’s mails. On he went, jingling faint and
fainter, bearing the news of the mountains down into the valleys, a
pleasant primitive figure of the pleasant primitive East. Young Browne
liked him particularly. “What a decent way of earning one’s living!”
said he.
Footnote 137:
The postman comes.
Footnote 138:
Animals.
The hills began to round out nobly before them now. The road took great
sweeps and curves, always penetrating and climbing, and a low stone wall
made its appearance running along the outer edge. Over the wall they
looked down upon a hurrying river and tree-tops; but the hill-sides
towered straight up beside them, lost in sarl, and oak, and mosses, and
shadows. They had climbed a very little way. The stillness seemed to
grow with the sunshine. Only now and then a jungle-fowl stirred, or a
hoo-poe cried, or they heard the trickling of a tiny stream that made
its ferny way down the face of the rock to the road. Underneath the warm
air lay always the cool scent; strange flowers bloomed in it, but did
not change it; it was the goodly smell of the mountains, and Helen,
respiring it, declared that it was the first time her nose had been the
slightest pleasure to her in India. They turned to look back—the hills
had grown up around them and shut them in; they were upon the solitary,
engirdling road, with its low stone parapet below unknown heights, above
unknown depths, insisting always upwards round the nearer masses to
hills that were greater, further, bluer. It was the little parapet,
Helen decided, that made it look so lonely. It must have taken
quantities of people to build the little parapet along such mighty
curves, and now they had all gone away down the road, and it seemed as
if none of them would ever come back.
After the dâk-wallah the _jogi_[139] with his matted hair and furtive
eyes. He asked nothing of the Brownes, the jogi, he extracted pice from
his own people, for the good of their souls; the souls of the Brownes
were past paying for; besides, it was so unlikely that a sahib would
pay. And after the jogi came a score of black, long-haired, long-horned
buffaloes, and a man seated upon an ass driving them. The buffaloes had
evidently never seen anything approaching a Browne before, for they all
with one accord stood quite still when they came within twenty yards of
these two, and stared with the stolidly resentful surprise that never
strikes one as an affectation in a buffalo. There were so very many
buffaloes and so very few Brownes and so little room for any of them
that the situation was awkward. “Keep close behind me and stick to the
inside,” young Browne enjoined his lady. “They _have_ been known to
charge at things they don’t understand, but they take a good while to
make up their minds.”
Footnote 139:
Religious beggar.
[Illustration: HE ASKED NOTHING OF THE BROWNES.]
“Do let’s try to squeeze past before they make them up,” said Helen
nervously; but as the Brownes circumspectly advanced each of the small
syces ran out from behind his pony’s heels, and laying hold of the
buffaloes by any horn, ear, or tail that came nearest, jostled them
intrepidly out of the way. And there was a deeper humiliation to come.
As they took their right of way at a trot with what dignity they might,
a buffalo calf, a highly idiotic baby bull, overcome by the dazzling
appearance of the Rajpore charger, turned round and trotted after him
and would not be denied. In vain young Browne smote him upon the nose,
in vain he who sat upon the ass abused with a loud voice the ancestors
of all buffaloes, the little bull fixed upon the charger a look which
said, “Entreat me not to leave thee,” and lumbered steadfastly
alongside. Already the little bull’s mamma, smelling desertion from the
rear, had looked round inquiringly—she was in process of turning—she was
after them horns down, tail straight out, and she was coming fast! There
was very little time for reflection, but it occurred irresistibly to
both the Brownes that the little bull’s mamma would not be likely to put
the blame upon the little bull. There was nothing for it but flight,
therefore, and they fled; promiscuous and fast, for even the ponies
appeared to understand that it was an unpleasant thing to be pursued by
an enraged female buffalo for the restitution of maternal rights. First
the flying Brownes, neck and neck exhorting each other to calmness, then
the bleating calf that chased the flying Brownes, then the snorting cow
that chased the bleating calf, and, finally, he upon the ass who chased
them all, with shouts and brayings to wake the mountainside. It was a
scene for the imperishable plate of a Kodak: there was hardly time to
take it with the imagination. As his ideal departed from him the calf
fell back into the hands, as it were, of his mother and his master; and
young Browne, glancing behind, declared with relief that they were both
licking him.
They stopped to rest, to consume quantities of bread and butter and
hard-boiled eggs, to ask milk of an out-cropping village. Milk was
plentiful in the village, cool creamy buffaloes’ milk, and the price was
small, but from what vessel should the sahib drink it? All the round
brass bowls that held it were sacred to the feeding of themselves,
sacred to personalities worth about four pice each; and the lips of a
sahib might not defile them. The outcast sahib bought a new little
earthen pot for a pice, breaking it solemnly on a stone when they had
finished; and even mixed with the taste of fired mud the buffaloes’ milk
was ambrosial.
On they went and up, the trees shelved further down below and grew
scantier above; upon the heights that rose before them there seemed to
be none at all. Down where the river was evening had fallen, and all the
hills behind stood in purple, but a little white cluster still shone
sunlit in a notch above them. Boophal pointed it out. “_Tin cos_,”[140]
said Boophal. They hastened on at that, all six of them; they rounded a
last flank, rattled over a bridge with a foaming torrent underneath, and
found themselves clinging, with several fowls, oxen, and people, to the
side of the gorge the torrent made. The dâk-bungalow sat on a ledge a
hundred feet or so further up, and the Brownes felt this to be
excessive. They climbed it, however, and entered into peace at the top.
There was a khansamah and two long chairs, there would be dinner. The
Diagram, unsaddled and fed, folded herself up like a chest of drawers
for repose; but the charger roamed up and down seeking something to
kick, and all night long at intervals they heard him chewing in
imagination the cud of the buffalo calf, neighing, yawning, biting his
under-lip.
Footnote 140:
Three miles.
Next day they saw what the creeping road had conquered, and what it had
yet to conquer. It was no longer question of climbing the great hills,
they were amongst the summits, they walked upon the heights, behind them
slope after outlying slope rose up and barred the way that they had
come; and yet the parapeted road, with its endless loops and curves
insisted upward, and the little military slabs that stood by the
mountainside told them that they had still eighteen, seventeen, sixteen
miles to follow it before they came to Chakrata, whence they should see
the Snows. Helen found it difficult to believe that the next turn would
not disclose them, that they were not lying fair and shining beyond that
brown mountain before her to the left—it was such a prodigious mountain,
it must be the last. But always the belting road sloped upward and
disappeared again, always behind the prodigious brown mountain rose a
more prodigious brown mountain still. They had astounding,
soul-stretching views, these Brownes, but always around and behind them;
before them rose ever the bulk of a single mountain, and the line of the
climbing girdling road.
When God gave men tongues, he never dreamed that they would want to talk
about the Himalayas; there are consequently no words in the world to do
it with. It is given to some of us, as it was given to these Brownes,
thus to creep and to climb up into the heart of them, to look down over
their awful verges and out upon the immensity of their slopes, to be
solitary in the stupendous surging, heaving mountain-sea that stands
mute and vast here upon the edge of the plains of India. Afterward these
people have more privacy than the rest of the world, for they have once
been quite alone in it, with perhaps a near boulder and a dragon-fly.
And their privacy is the more complete because there is no password to
let another in—language will not compass it. So they either babble
foolishly, or are silent.
The Brownes, in the fulness of their hearts, babbled foolishly. They
wondered whether the white speck near the top of the mountain across the
ravine was a cow or a house, and in either case how it held on. They
wondered what the curious blood-red crop could be, that lay in little
square patches far below them on the lower slopes where people had tiny
farms. They wondered how cold it was up there in the winter—it was jolly
cold now when you faced the wind. They found ox-eyed daisies and other
Christian flowers growing in clefts of the rock, and they gathered these
rejoicing. They implored each other to “keep to the inside” in places
where the low stone wall had been washed away, and neither of them dared
to look over. And they had an adventure which to this day Mrs. Browne
relates as blood-curdling.
It was in rounding an old sunny corner in silent disappointment at again
failing to find Chakrata. Young Browne, riding first, noticed a loose
pebble rattle down the side of the rock. Mrs. Browne insists that she
did not notice the pebble, and I don’t know that it is important to her
evidence that she should. But she certainly noticed the leopard, so
carefully that she never will be _quite_ sure it wasn’t a tiger. She saw
it rise from its four legs from a ledge of rock above young Browne’s
head and look at young Browne. Mrs. Browne is naturally unable to give
anyone an accurate idea of her emotion during the instant that followed,
but she was perfectly certain that it did not occur to young Browne to
transfix the animal with his eye, and he had nothing else. Neither it
did, but the situation did not find Mr. Browne entirely without presence
of mind notwithstanding. Raising his whip in a threatening manner Mr.
Browne said “Shoo!” and whatever may have been the value of that
expletive in Mr. Browne’s mouth under ordinary circumstances, in Mrs.
Browne’s opinion it saved his life on that occasion. For without even an
answering growl the leopard turned and trotted into the thicket quickly,
as if she had forgotten something.
“Did you see that, Helen?” inquired her husband, turning in his saddle.
“I sh-should think I did?” exclaimed Mrs. Browne. “_W-w-w-wait_ for me,
George!” And as the Diagram came up alongside, young Browne received
several tearful embraces, chiefly upon his arm, in the presence of the
syces. “I told you you ought to have a g-g-gun, darling, and you
_wouldn’t_ be advised,” Mrs. Browne reproached him hysterically. “It’s
all very well to laugh, but thin-thin-think of what _might_ have been!”
“It’s awful to think of what might have been if I had had a gun,” said
young Browne solemnly. “In the excitement of the moment I should have
been certain to let it go off, and then she would have been down on us,
sure. They hate guns awfully. Oh, we may be thankful I hadn’t a gun!”
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