Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/64

 and all that I had known or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the terrible fact just communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first landed in Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the existence, somewhere in India, of a place to which such Hindus as had the misfortune to recover from trance or catalepsy were conveyed and kept; and I recollect laughing consumcdly at what I was then pleased to consider a traveller's tale. Sitting at the bottom of the sand-trap, the memory of Watson's Hotel with its swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants and the sallow-faced Armenian, rose up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and for some utterly inexplicable reason I burst into a loud fit of laughter. The contrast was too absurd!

Gunga Dass, as be bent over the unclean bird, watched me curiously. Hindus seldom laugh, and his surroundings were not such as to move Gnnga Dass to any undue excess of hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly from the wooden spit and as solemnly finished it. Then he continued his story, which I give as nearly as I can remember in his own words:—

"In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burnt almost before you are dead. When you come to the river side the cold air perhaps make you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on your nose and mouth and you die conclusively. If you are rather more alive, more mud is put; but if you are too lively they let you go and take you away. I was too lively, and made protestation with anger against the indignities that they endeavoured to press upon me. In those days I was Brahmin and proud man. Now I am dead man and eat—[Here he eyed the well-gnawned breast-bone with the first sign of emotion that I had seen in him since we met]—"crows, and—other things. They took me from my sheets when they saw that I was too lively; and gave me medicines for one week, and I survived successfully. Then they sent me by rail from Howrah to Okara Station, with a man to take care of me; and at Okura Station we met two other men, and they conducted we three on camels, in the night, from Okara Station to this place, and they propelled me from the top to the bottom, and the other two succeeded, and I have been here ever since two and a half years. Once I was Brahmim and proud man; and now I eat crows."

"There is no way of getting out?