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Updated: May 25, 2025
Till the trap appeared Lenox paced the verandah; the punkah coolie groaned; and Zyarulla protested as openly as he dared against his Sahib being put to personal inconvenience for a base-born mere dust of the earth.
He ate very sparingly and drank plain soda water, and whilst he sat at the table his long, yellow-white fingers played on the cloth, and his eyes followed the swaying punkah mat with an odd, intense light in their inscrutable depths.
He discovered, too, that it was a good thing to lie in the wave of air under the punkah. Maybe Stanley had taught him all about this in barracks. At any rate, when the punkah stopped, Garin would first growl and cock his eye at the rope, and if that did not wake the man it nearly always did he would tiptoe forth and talk in the sleeper's ear.
Everybody looks quite different, and we begin to hope we shall carry the north-east monsoon right across, which would be an exceptional piece of good fortune. We had service in the saloon at eleven o'clock and at four, and though there was an unusually full attendance it was cool and pleasant even without the punkah.
How can one believe one has ever lain sweating with one's tongue lolling out, and listened to the whining creak of the punkah through nights too deadly hot to sleep in! It's like remembering hell while one lives in Paradise." "We shan't live in Paradise long," Hester said once with some bitterness. "Hell is waiting for us." "Damn it! don't remind a man. There are times when I don't believe it."
The punkah, a necessary appendage of every house, is worthy of description. It is formed of a wooden framework, a foot and a half or two feet broad, hung in the centre of the room, and extending nearly its whole length. This frame is covered with painted canvas or fluted silk, finished round the edges with gilt mouldings.
In a pause I went on meeting instinctively the heavy rolling of the ship, and Jacques put his feet upon the couch. The curtain of my bed-place swung to and fro as if it were a punkah, the bulkhead lamp circled in its gimbals, and now and then the cabin door rattled slightly in the gusts of wind.
Its amusements and attractions, however, are so outweighed by its wretched climate, that I would rather pass my days growing sugar in Singapore, than live amid all the splendour of this proud city. From April to October inclusive, the weather is oppressively hot, with a closeness in the atmosphere that renders respiration difficult, and existence, without a punkah, almost insupportable.
The thermometer marked for them one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London.
He ceased writing suddenly, and, leaping to his feet, walked to the door of his bungalow, which was open to the four winds of heaven. In doing this he passed from the range of the lazy punkah flapping somnolently over table and bed. It may have been this sudden change to hotter air that caused him to raise his hand to his forehead, which was high and strangely rounded.
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