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Updated: June 29, 2025


For the same post had brought him a letter from Noreen Daleham which told him that she was then, and had been for some time, in that hill-station. The climate of the Terai, unpleasantly but not unbearably hot in the summer months, is pestilential and deadly during the rains, when malaria and the more dreaded black-water fever take toll of the strongest.

In the following year the gentle wife and mother, worn out by India, died at a hill-station in the Himalayas, and a few months later her husband, ill and heartbroken, sent his motherless children home by long sea, and followed himself by the overland route. Too late! He was taken ill in Egypt, struggled on to Malta, and was put ashore at Gibraltar to die.

From Bombay, in India, I travelled north to the end of the railway, at Kathgodam, and then by carts and horses to Naini Tal. At this little hill-station on the lower Himahlyas, in the north-west Province of India, I prepared my expedition, resolved to force my way in the Unknown Land. Naini Tal is 6407 feet above the level of the sea.

The narrow-gauge railway ends at Kathgodam, fifteen miles from Naini Tal, and the last four miles to the hill-station have to be ridden up, I should imagine, the steepest road in the world. It is like the side of a house. People have before now slipped over their horses' tails going up that terrific ascent, and I cannot conceive how the horses' girths manage to hold.

That unobservant man had just written at length, privately and confidentially, both to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab at the hill-station and to the Resident at Kohara. And to both he had written to the one effect: "We must expect trouble in Chiltistan." He based his conclusions upon the glimpse which he had obtained into the troubled feelings of Shere Ali.

He ceased to brood unhappily for it had come to that on Violet, who, as her rare letters told him, had spent the Hot Weather in the Bombay hill-station of Mahableshwar and was now enjoying life during the Rains in gay Poona. She seldom wrote, and then but scrappily; and it seemed to him certain that she was forgetting him. And he felt ashamed at the joy which filled him at the thought.

As all Government and private offices in Calcutta are closed for it, every European there, who can, escapes to Darjeeling, twenty-four hours away by rail, and the Season in that hill-station dies in a final blaze of splendour and gaiety in the mad rush of revelry of the Puja holidays.

It was Wargrave's first introduction to a hill-station; and everything was a delightful novelty to him, from the quaint little train that brought them up the seven thousand feet to their destination in the pretty town of villas, clubs and hotels in the mountains, to the glorious panorama of the Eternal Snows and Kinchinjunga's lofty crests that rise like fairyland into the sky at early dawn and under the brilliant Indian moon.

She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the end of the season; and in all likelihood would never return to Simla again, her proper Hill-station being Ootacamund. That night, Hannasyde, raw and savage from the raking up of all old feelings, took counsel with himself for one measured hour.

And he had agreed to forgo this the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him, to "suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life, merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. He anathematised himself for an inconsistent weak-minded fool. But he had no intention of breaking his promise to Mrs Desmond.

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