Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/273

 up the stragglers, rousing the sleeping drivers with fine bursts of the vernacular. And so, up and down the line, till we were hoarse with shouting, and till the last Waggon had left the outskirts of the town.

4 a.m.—For an hour we had been leading the way, jogging along the straight, broad road. Jim had dropped to sleep, and was swaying heavily from side to side, his battered face resting on my shoulder.

Behind us the continuous, somnolent rumbling of the waggon wheels, and the rhythmical tramp of the horses' feet. Now and then, a boy on a thoroughbred would gallop past us, cracking his stock-whip, chasing a drove of foals. The treeless plain lay around us, all dark and mysterious; at intervals, we brutally broke the silence of some sleeping village street.

By-and-by, a rift broke in the clouds; a slab of dark-blue sky appeared; and the rain ceased to beat in our faces.

And a strange, drowsy sensation crept over me—a sensation that I had been sitting there always, driving the cream-coloured mare, endlessly journeying through the night, with the long line of waggons lumbering behind.

6 a.m.—When I awoke, the sun had risen, and the great plain of corn, stretching away and away to the horizon, was rippling in the fresh morning breeze like a glittering golden lake. Crowds of peasants were running from their harvesting to the road-side to watch us go by. Moving ahead I could see a dark, shifting mass; the elephants were still some two miles away. I fell to wondering curiously concerning this strange little world with whom I had thrown