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Updated: May 29, 2025
Even stranger things were happening than that two bullock-carts should dawdle through a rebel-seething district in the direction of a plundered, blood-soaked rebel stronghold; stranger even than that on the foremost bullock-cart a lean and louse-infested fakir should be squatting, guarded by British soldiers, who marched on either hand; or that a Rajput, who could trace his birth from a thousand-year-long line of royal chieftains, should be sleeping in the bullock-cart behind, followed closely by a black charger with a British saddle on its back, which ate corn from the tail-board of the wagon; stranger things, even, than that a British sergeant should be marching last of all, with his stern eyes roving a little wildly but his jaw set firm and his tread as rigid and authoritative and abrupt as though he were marching to inspect accouterments.
It comes down from a time when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government a shelter, merely, and nothing more. He had to carry bedding along, or do without.
Along the road walked two men, phantom-like. One saw their heads dimly and still more dimly their bodies to the knees; of legs, there was nothing visible. Occasionally they stepped aside to permit some bullock-cart to pass. One of them swore, not with any evidence of temper, not viciously, but in a kind of mechanical protest, which, from long usage, had become a habit.
In the blazing sun a couple of hooded hunting-cheetahs lay panting on the bullock-cart to which they were chained. The Palace stood in the heart of the city of Lalpuri, a maze of narrow, malodorous streets off which ran still narrower and fouler lanes.
The morning breeze coming fresh from the newly ploughed land, the sweet and tender smell of the flowering mustard, the shepherd-boy's flute sounding in the distance, even the creaking noise of the bullock-cart, as it groaned over the broken village road, filled my world with delight.
So I bundled in somehow, said a wistful good-bye to Boggley, and we started. I can't honestly say I like a doolie. I would rather have been my luggage and gone in the bullock-cart. Whichever way I lay I very soon got an ache in my back. The conduct, too, of the coolies filled me with uneasiness. They kept up a continued groaning.
A bullock-cart, laden with pitch, came jolting down past us; and we observed that the lumps, when the fracture is fresh, have all a drawn-out look; that the very air-bubbles in them, which are often very numerous, are all drawn out likewise, long and oval, like the air-bubbles in some ductile lavas.
Very often it suits a longsuffering family that a strong-tongued, iron-willed old lady should disport herself about India in this fashion; for certainly pilgrimage is grateful to the Gods. So all about India, in the most remote places, as in the most public, you find some knot of grizzled servitors in nominal charge of an old lady who is more or less curtained and hid away in a bullock-cart.
This clever old man is doing three things at once minding his sheep, smoking his pipe, and knitting a stocking. The Danes are great knitters, men and women being equally good at it. Many girls are working in the fields, their various coloured garments making bright specks on the landscape. Occasionally a bullock-cart slowly drags its way across the field-road, laden with clattering milk-cans.
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