Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/29

 There was no portent in the air, no sign in the sky that evening, as we watched the sunset from the verandah of Laura's room; but before dawn of the next day the crisis of our lives had come.

The night was sultry, and rest was impossible for some hours after i lay down, but I fell at last into a sleep so deep that neither dream nor vision could penetrate it. From this I was suddenly roused by a terrible clamour, and by flashes of lurid light that seemed to extinguish the pale gleam of my night-lamp. Hideous sounds—that to my half-awakened, wholly bewildered, senses conveyed no meaning, but fell on my startled ear with a nameless horror such as the dead may feel when roused from their long sleep by the trump of doom on the Last Day—resolved themselves at length into a delirious beating of innumerable tom-toms, and the frantic yell of anguish and affright. I saw that the red light flamed from a score of torches held by the plantation coolies who hurried aimlessly hither and thither. Before I had time to speculate as to the meaning of this terrible scene, my bearer rushed into the room, a ghastly pallor overlying his brown colour; and gasped with shivering lips, which he could with difficulty control sufficiently for speech—"The cholera, sahib! the cholera!"

I dashed past him, and on to the large door at the front of the house. The planter and a couple of Eurasian overseers were standing under the porch, from which position the distracted coolies could be plainly seen. Dismay was written on their faces, and not without cause; for in the silent night the cholera had fallen like a thunderbolt upon the village; a dozen coolies were dead since midnight, a score more were dying, and the remainder, panic-stricken and helpless, were flying in all directions. There was no doctor within reach, and if there had been, what could he have done against the awful power which even to its victims gave no warning of its approach, but with invisible hand wrung the life out of a man in an hour's time?

The planter alone was calm and self-possessed. "There are medicines," he said to the overseers; "you can give them; but—I have seen this before. Tell them to put the stick into the large godown; and, if any one can be found to do it, make them burn the dead at once."