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Updated: June 9, 2025
But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dâk-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate later on. I went into my own room and prepared to pack after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked I heard the game begin again, with a miss in balk this time, for the whir was a short one.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dak-bungalow was the worst of the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the house, and the toddy-palms rattled and roared.
I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave. I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below. "Has this place always been a dâk-bungalow?" I asked. "No," said the khansamah. "Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room." "A how much?"
But the end of it was a bargain of reasonable dimensions for ourselves, our personal boys, and our loads. Under plea of starting our safari boys off we left him, and crept, with shattered nerves, around the corner of the dak-bungalow. There we lurked, busy at pretended affairs, until our friend swaggered away to the Hindu quarters, where, it seems, he had his residence.
Whether he interpreted or not the exact meaning of what Cunningham had said, he at least produced the desired effect; the servant mumbled apologetic nothings and slunk off the veranda backward to go away and hold his sides with laughter at the back of the dak-bungalow.
"The hand and eye are good!" said Mahommed Gunga. "It is time now for another test." So he made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for four days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a foul-mouthed fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads. It was a strangely chosen place to rest at.
The overland telegraph pointed absolutely straight to the border city of Kot Ghazi and, better still, to a river-bed which would contain pools of water, thirty miles this side of it, at a spot a few miles from which stood a lost lone dak-bungalow on Indian soil a dak-bungalow whereat would be waiting a shikarri retainer, and such things as tea, fuel, potted foods, possibly fresh meat, and luxury of luxuries, a hot bath....
He would start just before dawn on Abdul's shikar camel, be well away from Kot Ghazi by daylight and reach the old deserted dak-bungalow, that no one ever used, by evening. There Abdul would come to him with his bhoja-oont bringing the usual supplies, and on receipt of them he would dismiss Abdul altogether and disappear again into the desert, this time for good.
However, there doesn't seem to be anything to do but take you. How much for the two of us?" "Your servant, sahib? He cannot ride in this tonga," asserted the driver impassively. "He can't! Why not?" "You can see there is room for but two, and I have yet another passenger." "Where?" "At the first dak-bungalow, Sahib, where the mail-tonga broke down last night.
Left wondering. And ye shall be as Gods! SCENE. Thymy grass-plot at back of the Mahasu dak-bungalow, overlooking little wooded valley. On the left, glimpse of the Dead Forest of Fagoo; on the right, Simla Hills. In background, line of the Snows. CAPTAIN GADSBY, now three weeks a husband, is smoking the pipe of peace on a rug in the sunshine. Banjo and tobacco-pouch on rug.
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