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A dinner in India is, to one unaccustomed to it, a striking sight. The punkah waving slowly to and fro, overhead, drives the cool air which comes in through the open windows down upon the table. Each guest brings his own servant, who, either in white or coloured robes, and in turbans of many different hues and shapes, according to the wearer's caste, stands behind his master's chair.
With the leisurely swaying of the punkah, light and shadow flitted across the wide, low bed, on one side of which Honor lay, warmly covered with blankets, her breath coming in laboured gasps. Desmond knelt by her; and, on Meredith's entrance, set down the feeding-cup, but because her hand was on his coat-sleeve, he did not change his position, or rise from his knees.
Now and again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a punkah and an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler, and who lived in such a nasty fashion.
There is not enough hydrochloric or pepsine left in the town to make a true extract of horse, but by boiling and evaporation the strength is raised till every pint issued will make three pints of soup. A punkah is to be fitted to make the evaporation more rapid, and perhaps my horse will ultimately appear as a jelly or a lozenge.
The string worked a punkah on the other side of the green door, where the so-called private office was, and where old Hudig the Master sat enthroned, holding noisy receptions.
I slept but indifferently; I missed the cooling swish of the punkah, and all through my dreams the crackle and breaking of glass seemed to mingle with the insistent buzz of the tiger-gnats. Baboo's diminutive form kept flitting between me and the fireflies.
You arise in the morning played out after a comfortless night under a punkah, which, hung over your bed in the limited space of a mosquito house, is pulled with a rope passing through the wall by a coolie stationed on the verandah outside.
There would be the rifle carefully uncleaned, with the fouling marks about breech and muzzle, to be sworn to by half a dozen superfluous privates; there would be heat, reeking heat, till the wet pencil slipped sideways between the fingers; and the punkah would swish and the pleaders would jabber in the verandahs, and his Commanding Officer would put in certificates of the prisoner's moral character, while the jury would pant and the summer uniforms of the witnesses would smell of dye and soaps; and some abject barrack-sweeper would lose his head in cross-examination, and the young barrister who always defended soldiers' cases for the credit that they never brought him, would say and do wonderful things, and would then quarrel with me because I had not reported him correctly.
He clung to his renewed hope with a desperation that was terrible; realising more acutely than before that to let go of her was to fall into nameless spaces void of companionship and love. Once or twice the flicker of the punkah frill created an illusion of movement in the face, and his heart leapt into his throat, only to sink to the depths again when he discovered his mistake.
But air which is merely cold to the feelings air in which the thermometer stands high, but which merely gives us one of the external sensations of coolness on being made by a punkah, or any other mere blowing machine, to move rapidly over our skin or on being charged with watery vapour, or on being contrasted with previous excessive heat such air must, nevertheless, be rarefied to the full extent indicated by the mercurial thermometer, and give us, therefore, our supply of vital oxygen in a very diluted form, and of a meagre, unsupporting, and unsatisfying consistence.... The sine quâ non, therefore, for healthy and robust life in tropical countries, is air cold and dry cold to the thermometer and dry to the hygrometer; or, in other words, dense, and containing little else than the necessary oxygen and azote, and this supplied to a room, fresh and fresh, in a continual current.
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