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Updated: May 3, 2025
The depolarized and bewildered Damocles found himself in a strange and truly foreign land, a queer, cold, dismal country inhabited by vast quantities of "second-class sahibs," as he termed the British lower middle-class and poor, a country of a strange greenness and orderedness, where there were white servants, strangely conjoined rows of houses in the villages, dangerous-looking fires inside the houses, a kind of tomb-stones on all house-tops, strange horse-drawn vehicles, butlerless and ghari -less sahibs, and an utter absence of "natives," sepoys, byle-gharies, camels, monkeys, kites, squirrels, bulbuls, minahs, mongooses, palm-trees, and temples.
The mud dykes and the rice fields usually are covered with tracks of civets, mongooses, and cats which come to hunt frogs or fish, but if a trap is set it either catches a Chinaman or promptly is stolen. Moreover, the small mammals are neither abundant nor varied in number of species, and the larger forms, such as tiger, leopard, wild pig and serow are exceedingly difficult to kill.
If Darzee had helped they might have turned her, but Nagaina only lowered her hood and went on. Still, the instant's delay brought Rikki-tikki up to her, and as she plunged into the rat-hole where she and Nag used to live, his little white teeth were clenched on her tail, and he went down with her and very few mongooses, however wise and old they may be, care to follow a cobra into its hole.
It was like opening a Christmas package as we walked up the trails, for each one held interesting possibilities and the mammals of the region were so varied that surprises were always in store for us. Besides civets and polecats, we caught mongooses, palm civets, and other carnivores. The small traps yielded a new Hylomys, several new rats, and an interesting shrew.
"Well," said Rikki-tikki, and his tail began to fluff up again, "marks or no marks, do you think it is right for you to eat fledglings out of a nest?" Nag was thinking to himself, and watching the least little movement in the grass behind Rikki-tikki. He knew that mongooses in the garden meant death sooner or later for him and his family, but he wanted to get Rikki-tikki off his guard.
At any rate, if you really think that it would do you good, you had better order your servant to do it; that is to say, if you don't think you would slay him, the first morning." "No, I suppose I must put up with it, as best I can; but really, sometimes I do envy the colonel's little terrier, which frisks along all day, making excursions occasionally into the bush, to look for rats or mongooses.
Two bush bucks plunged into the thicket as we approached, and fifteen or twenty mongooses sat up as straight and stiff as so many picket pins the better to see us. For a moment my heart sank. The low undergrowth beneath the trees apparently swept unbroken from where we stood to the low bank opposite.
"To prevent the increase of these rodents, the introduction of weasels, stoats, mongooses, etc., has been tried; but it has been found that those carnivores neglected the rabbits and took to feeding on poultry, and thus became as great a nuisance as the animals they were intended to destroy. The attempt to kill them off by the introduction of an epidemic disease has also failed.
'Just think, he saved all our lives. Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for all the mongooses are light sleepers. 'Oh, it's you, said he. 'What are you bothering for? All the cobras are dead; and if they weren't, I'm here.
Ali Hamid's son took us the next day on fast-trotting camels to visit some graffiti on basaltic rocks about eight miles distant. Here we found representations of animals chiselled on the hard rocks, similar to those we saw in Wadi Gabeit; we could recognise gazelles, camels, and elephants, and we thought the artist also had intended to depict giraffes, mongooses, and other strange beasts.
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