Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/65

 "None of what kind at all. When I first came I made experiments frequently and all the others also, but we have always succumbed to the sand which is precipitated upon our heads."

"But surely," I broke in at this point, "the river front is open, and it is worth while dodging the bullets, while at night." I had already matured a rough plan of escape which a natural instinct of selfishness forbade me sharing with Gunga Dass. He, however, devined my unspoken thought almost as soon as it was formed; and, to my intense astonishment, gave vent to a long low chuckle of derision—the laughter, be it understood, of a superior or at least of an equal. "You will not"—he had dropped the Sir completely after his opening sentence,—"make any escape that way; but you can try. I have tried. Once only."

The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear which I had in vain attempted to strive against overmastered me completely. My long fast—it was now close upon ten o'clock, and I had tasted nothing since tiffin on the previous day, combined with violent and unnatural agitation, had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled myself against the pitiless sand slope. I ran round the base of the crater, blaspheming and praying in turns. I crawled out among the sedges of the river-front, only to be driven back each time in an agony of nervous dread by the rifle bullets which cut up the sand round me—for I dared not face the death of a mad dog among that terrible crowd,—and finally fell spent and raving at the kerb of the well. No one had taken the slightest notice of an exhibition which makes me blush hotly even when I think of it. Two or three men trod on my panting body as they drew water, but they were evidently used to this sort of thing, and had no time to waste upon me. The situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass indeed, when he had banked the embers of his fire with sand, was at some pains to throw half a cupful of fetid water over my head, an attention for which I could have fallen on my knees and thanked him, but he was laughing all the while in the same mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my first attempt to force the shoals. And so in a semi-comatose condition I lay till noon. Then, being only a man after all, I felt hungry and intimated as much to Gunga Dass whom I had begun to regard as my natural protector. Following the impulse of the outer world when dealing with natives I put my hand into pocket and drew out four