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The topi is something like the hartebeest, but much more beautiful and much more rare. It is over four feet high, with skin of a dark reddish brown, with a silklike bluish gray gloss. On the shoulders and thighs are bluish black patches and the forehead and nose are blackish brown. The under parts are bright cinnamon.
Only in Piccadilly could he have purchased his wondrous sola topi, or pith helmet with its imitation puggri neatly frilled and puckered and no tailor who ever carried his goose through the Exile's Gate would have fashioned his expensive garments. But the old gentleman made no pretence that he could "hear the East a-callin'." He swore impartially at the climate, the place, and its inhabitants.
Against his own trained judgment, he wavered and yielded, and at length took his white topi from a peg on the wall and walked out slowly up the garden. It was three in the afternoon.
The grass wore through the knees of my trousers and the sharp stubbles cut my palms; once a snake darted out of a clump of grass just as my hand was descending upon it, and lizards frequently shot away within a yard of my nose. My neck was nearly broken from looking forward while on my hands and knees, and it was nearly an hour of creeping progress that I spent while stalking that topi.
"Idiot," she said, as she shut the door of her room and flung her topi on the bed, and she repeated the word several times with increasing animosity and vigour. She hated Hartley at that moment, and felt under no further obligation to hide her real feelings; and then Mrs. Wilder sat down and thought hard.
Russel, who, like all Anglo-Indians, has a profound respect for the power of the Eastern sun. The children are taught that one thing they must not do is to run out without a topi.
They twitched, as a dry cackle of laughter broke out. "Kut Sing, ahoy!" shouted Heywood. "On deck! Kneebone!" The shoes whipped inboard. Outboard popped a ruddy little face, set in the green circle of a topi, and contorted with laughter. "Listen to this, will ye!" cried the apparition, as though illustrating a point.
There is room. It was still very hot: smoked spectacles kept off a certain amount of glare, and I wore two hats, a straw on top of a felt, having neglected to bring a solar topi; but even so the sun was unnecessarily generous, glowing on the splendid polish which some of the Arabs carried on their sepia-coloured skulls, and making it impossible to follow the crested larks, singing their heads off, up in the brilliant sky.
When I got within two hundred and fifty yards, and was just ready to take a careful aim, with an ant-hill as a rest, a kongoni somewhere gave the alarm, and away went the topi, safe and sound but badly scared. The kongoni went a little way off and then turned and grinned broadly.
Scarcely indeed had I seated myself, and actually while I was placing my topi on an adjacent stool, a lady emerged from a distant door at the end of the verandah and walked towards me.
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