Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/77

 "Read it aloud! Read it aloud! I beg and I pray you to read it aloud."

I did so. Gunga Dass listened delightedly, and drew an irregular line in the sand with his fingers.

"See now! It was the length of his gun-barrels without the stock. I have those barrels. Four gun-barrels out from the place where I caught crows. Straight out; do you follow me? Then three left—Ah! how well I remember when that man worked it out night after night. Then nine out, and so on. Out is always straight before you across the quicksand. He told me so before I killed him."

"But if you knew all this, why didn't you get out before?"

"I did not know it. He told me that he was working it out a year and-a-half ago, and how he was working it out night after night when the boat had gone away, and he could get out to the quicksand safely. Then he said that we would get away together. But I was afraid that he would leave me behind one night when he had worked it all out, and so I shot him. Besides, it is not advisable that the men who once got in here should oscape. Only I, and I am a Brahmin."

The prospect of escape had brought Gunga Dass's caste back to him. He stood up, walked about and gesticulated violently. Eventually I managed to make him talk soberly, and he told me how this Englishman had spent six months, night after night, in exploring inch by inch the passage that existed across the quicksand, how when found he had declared it to be simplicity itself, up to within about twenty yards of the river bank, after turning the flank of the left horn of the horse-shoe. This much he had evidently not completed when Gunga Dass shot him with his own gun which the Brahmin stole.

In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities of escape I recollect shaking hands effusively with Gunga Dass, after we had decided that we were to make an attempt that very night. It was weary, weary work waiting throughout the afternoon. About ten o'clock, as far as I could judge, when the Moon had just risen above the lip of the crater, Gunga Dass made a move for his burrow to bring out the gun-barrels whereby to measure our path. All the other wretched inhabitants had retired to their lairs long ago. The guardian boat drifted down-stream about seven o'clock, and we were utterly alone by the crow clump. Gunga Dass, while carrying the gun-barrels, accidentally let slip the piece of paper which