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Updated: May 9, 2025
A peculiar quietness had marked the passage of the night, and with the vanishing of the mists a strange silence filled the air. Since the landing nearly a month back, the continuous music of rifle fire, with its echoes and re-echoes among the nullahs and cliffs, had scarcely ever ceased.
On every hand, behind and before them, the desert lay in ebbing shadows, a rolling waste seared by arid nullahs the bone-dry beds of long-forgotten streams. Off in the north the hills cropped up and stole purposelessly away over the horizon. They stood, then, forlorn in a howling desolation.
They therefore contented themselves with firing occasional shots, beginning while we were at dinner, and continuing at intervals until daylight. No one was hurt, but we may imagine that the tribesmen, who spent the night prowling about the nullahs, and firing from time to time, returned to their countrymen next morning boasting of what they had done.
With seven-coss strides he comes to Ayodhya, and straightway finds the banian hut in the forest, where Rama dwells with Seeta in the devout dirtiness of their jolly yogeery. The god has gone abroad in search of a dinner, and is over the hills to the sandy nullahs, where the white ants are fattest; while that greasy Joan, Seeta, "doth keel the pot" at home.
At about a-mile-and-a-half they came on to a number of blacks fishing, these immediately crossed to the other side, but on their return, swam across again in numbers, armed with large bundles of spears and some nullahs and met them. The horsemen seeing they were in for another row, now cantered forward towards the camp, determined this time to give their assailants a severe lesson.
Creeping down the ravines seaming the soft soil and worn by the streams that flow through the forest from the hills they pull down the cows grazing or coming to drink in the nullahs, which are filled with small trees and scrubs affording good cover.
But as soon as the brigade began its homeward march, they appeared in much larger numbers than had hitherto been seen. As the cavalry could not work among the nullahs and the broken ground, the enemy advanced boldly into the plain. In a great crescent, nearly four miles long, they followed the retiring troops. A brisk skirmish began at about 800 yards.
We proceeded about a quarter of a mile ahead, and then turned into the jungle on our left. Continuing for at least 300 yards, we arrived at some open ground much broken by shallow nullahs, which formed natural drains in a slight depression of grassy land between very low hills of jungle, through which we had recently passed.
The sides of these nullahs were sheer cliffs often fifteen feet or more in depth so that they became really formidable obstacles to progress, though excellent places for shelter from artillery fire. They were the result, we supposed, of the sudden heavy winter rainstorms rushing down the hill sides, but for 350 days out of the 365 they were completely dry. During this time the Staff were not idle.
In their excitement they forgot about the boy, and when they looked round became aware that both he and the coolie had disappeared. The sides of the hills all about were covered with low shrubs, large stones, and nullahs, or ravines, and, although a quick search was made, neither man nor boy could be seen.
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