Page:O Douglas - Olivia in India.djvu/195

Rh the feeling of being a tinker sleeping in a barn. At night a tent is an awesome place. It is terrible to have no door to lock, and to be entirely at the mercy of anything that creeps and crawls; to have only a mosquito-net between you and an awful end. I woke last night to hear something sniffing outside the tent. It scraped and scraped, and I was sure that it was digging a hole and creeping underneath the canvas. I sat up in bed and in a quavering voice said "Go away," and the noise stopped, but only to begin again—scrape, scrape, snuffle, snuffle, in the most eerie way. Then something worse happened. At my very ear, as it seemed, the most blood-curdling yell rent the astonished air. It was only a jackal, Boggley says, but it sounded as if all the forces of evil had been let loose at once. You can laugh if you like, but I think it was enough to frighten a very Daniel. As for me, in one moment I was well under the blankets, with fingers in both ears, and I suppose even in the midst of my terror I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew was daylight and the cheerful sound of voices. To-night I shall have a lamp burning and a chokidar (watchman) to sleep outside my tent.

Baratah is quite a large town, and has a Roman