Book: The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition

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"What other Sahib, you swine? Speak at once, and don't stop to
tell me a lie."

"He is over there," answered Gunga Dass, pointing to a
burrow-mouth about four doors ta the left of my own. "You can
see for yourself. He died in the burrow as you will die, and I will
die, and as all these men and women and the one child will also
die."

"For pity's sake tell me all you know about him. Who was he?
When did he come, and when did he die?"

This appeal was a weak step on my part. Gunga Dass only leered
and replied:-"I will not-unless you give me something first."

Then I recollected where I was, and struck the man between the
eyes, partially stunning him. He stepped down from the platform
at once, and, cringing and fawning and weeping and attempting to
embrace my feet, led me round to the burrow which he had
indicated.

"I know nothing whatever about the gentleman. Your God be my
witness that I do not. He was as anxious to escape as you were,
and he was shot from the boat, though we all did all things te
prevent him from attempting. He was shot here." Gunga Dass laid
his hand on his lean stomach and bowed to the earth.

"Well, and what then? Go on!"

"And then-and then, Your Honor, we carried him in to his house
and gave him water, and put wet cloths on the wound, and he laid
down in his house and gave up the ghost."

"In how long? In how long?"

"About half an hour, after he received his wound. I call Vishnu to
witness," yelled the wretched man, "that I did everything for him.
Everything which was possible, that I did!"

He threw himself down on the ground and clasped my ankles. But
I had my doubts about Gunga Dass's benevolence, and kicked him
off as he lay protesting.

"I believe you robbed him of everything he had. But I can find out
in a minute or two. How long was the Sahib he'~?"

"Nearly a year and a half. I think he must have gone mad. But hear
me swear Protector of the Poor! Won't Your Honor hear me swear
that I never touched an article that belonged to him? What is Your
Worship going to do?"

I had taken Gunga Dass by the waist and had hauled him on to the
platform opposite the deserted burrow. As I did so I thought of my
wretched fellow-prisoner's unspeakable misery among all these
horrors for eighteen months, and the final agony of dying like a rat
in a hole, with a bullet-wound in the stomach. Gunga Dass
fancied I was going to kill him and howled pitifully. The rest of
the population, in the plethora that follows a full flesh meal,
watched us without stirring.

"Go inside, Gunga Dass," said I, "and fetch it out."

I was feeling sick and faint with horror now. Gunga Dass nearly
rolled off the platform and howled aloud.

"But I am Brahmin, Sahib-a high-caste Brahmin. By your soul, by
your father's soul, do not make me do this thing!"

"Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father's soul, in you
go!" I said, and, seizing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head
into the mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest of him in, and, sitting
down, covered my face with my hands.

At the end of a few minutes I heard a rustle and a creak; then
Gunga Dass in a sobbing, choking whisper speaking to himself;
then a soft thud-and I uncovered my eyes.

The dry sand had turned the corpse entrusted to its keeping into a
yellow-brown mummy. I told Gunga Dass to stand off while I
examined it.
The body-clad in an olive-green hunting-suit much stained and
worn, with leather pads on the shoulders-was that of a man
between thirty and forty, above middle height, with light, sandy
hair, long mustache, and a rough unkempt beard. The left canine
of the upper jaw was missing, and a portion of the lobe of the right
ear was gone. On the second finger of the left hand was a ring-a
shield-shaped bloodstone set in gold, with a monogram that might
have been either "B.K." or "B.L." On the third finger of the right
hand was a silver ring in the shape of a coiled cobra, much worn
and tarnished. Gunga Dass deposited a handful of trifles he had
picked out of the burrow at my feet, and, covering the face of the
body with my handkerchief, I turned to examine these. I give the
full list in the hope that it may lead to the identification of the
unfortunate man:

1. Bowl of a briarwood pipe, serrated at the edge; much worn and
blackened; bound with string at the crew.

2. Two patent-lever keys; wards of both broken.

3. Tortoise-shell-handled penknife, silver or nickel. name-plate,
marked with monogram "B.K."

4. Envelope, postmark Undecipherable, bearing a Victorian
stamp, addressed to "Miss Mon-" (rest illegible) -"ham"-"nt."

5. Imitation crocodile-skin notebook with pencil. First forty-five
pages blank; four and a half illegible; fifteen others filled with
private memoranda relating chiefly to three persons-a Mrs.L.

Singleton, abbreviated several times to "Lot Single," "Mrs. S.

May," and "Garmison," referred to in places as "Jerry" or "Jack."

6.Handle of small-sized hunting-knife. Blade snapped short.
Buck's horn, diamond cut, with swivel and ring on the butt;
fragment of cotton cord attached.

It must not be supposed that I inventoried all these things on the
spot as fully as I have here written them down. The notebook first
attracted my attention, and I put it in my pocket with a view of
studying it later on.

The rest of the articles I conveyed to my burrow for safety's sake,
and there being a methodical man, I inventoried them. I then
returned to the corpse and ordered Gunga Dass to help me to carry
it out to the river-front. While we were engaged in this, the
exploded shell of an old brown cartridge dropped out of one of the
pockets and rolled at my feet. Gunga Dass had not seen it; and I
fell to thinking that a man does not carry exploded cartridge-cases,
especially "browns," which will not bear loading twice, about with
him when shooting. In other words, that cartridge-case had been
fired inside the crater. Consequently there must be a gun
somewhere. I was on the verge of asking Gunga Dass, but checked
myself, knowing that he would lie. We laid the body down on the
edge of the quicksand by the tussocks. It was my intention to push
it out and let it be swallowed up-the only possible mode of burial
that I could think of. I ordered Gunga Dass to go away.

Then I gingerly put the corpse. out on the quicksand. In doing so.

it was lying face downward, I tore the frail and rotten khaki
shooting-coat open, disclosing a hideous cavity in the back. I have
already told you that the dry sand had, as it were, mummified the
body. A moment's glance showed that the gaping hole had been
caused by a gun-shot wound; the gun must have been fired with
the muzzle almost touching the back. The shooting-coat, being
intact, had been drawn over the body after death, which must have
been instantaneous. The secret of the poor wretch's death was
plain to me in a flash. Some one of the crater, presumably Gunga
Dass, must have shot him with his own gun--the gun that fitted the
brown cartridges. He had never attempted to escape in the face of
the rifle-fire from the boat.

I pushed the corpse out hastily, and saw it sink from sight literally
in a few seconds. I shuddered as I watched. In a dazed,
half-conscious way I turned to peruse the notebook. A stained and
discolored slip of paper bad been inserted between the binding and
the back, and dropped out as I opened the pages. This is what it
contained:-"Four out from crow-clump: three left; nine out; two
right; three back; two left; fourteen out; two left; seven out; one
left; nine back; two right; six back; four right; seven back." The
paper had been burned and charred at the edges. What it meant I
could not understand. I sat down on the dried bents turning it over
and over between my fingers, until I was aware of Gunga Dass
standing immediately behind me with glowing eyes and
outstretched hands.

"Have you got it?" he panted. "Will

you not let me lank at it also? I swear that I will return it."

"Got what? Return what?" asked.

"That which you have in your hands. It will help us both." He
stretched out his long, bird-like talons, trembling with eagerness.

"I could never find it," he continued. "He had secreted it about his
person. Therefore I shot him, but nevertheless I was unable to
obtain it."

Gunga Dass had quite forgotten his little fiction about the
rifle-bullet. I received the information perfectly calmly.
Morality is blunted by consorting with the Dead who are alive.

"What on earth are you raving about? What is it you want me to
give you?"

"The piece of paper in the notebook. It will help us both. Oh, you
fool! You fool! Can you not see what it will do for us? We shall
escape!"

His voice rose almost to a scream, and he danced with excitement
before me. I own I was moved at the chance of my getting away.

"Don't skip! Explain yourself. Do you mean to say that this slip of
paper will help us? What does it mean?"

"Read it aloud! Read it aloud! I beg and I pray you to read it
aloud."

I did so. Gunga Dass listened delightedly, and drew an irregular
line in the sand with his fingers.

"See now! It was the length of his gun-barrels without the stock. I
have those barrels. Four gun-barrels out from the place where I
caught crows Straight out; do you follow me? Then three left-Ah!
how well I remember when that man worked it out night after
night Then nine out, and so on. Out is always straight before
you across the quicksand. He told me so before I killed him."

'~But if you knew all this why didn't you get out before?"

"I did not know it. He told me that he was working it out a year
and a half ago, and how he was working it out night after night
when the boat bad gone away, and he could get out near ~be
quicksand safely. Then he said that we would get away together.
But I was afraid that he would leave me behind one night when he
had worked it all out, and so I shot him. Besides, it is not
advisable that the men who once get in here should escape. Only
I, and I am a Brahmin."

The prospect of escape had brought Gunga Dass's caste back to
him. He stood up, walked about and gesticulated violently.
Eventually I managed to make him talk soberly, and he told me
how this Englishman had spent six months night after night in
exploring, inch by inch, the passage across the quicksand; how he
had declared it to be simplicity itself up to within about twenty
yards of the river bank after turning the flank of the left horn of the
horseshoe. This much he had evidently not completed when
Gunga Dass shot him with his own gun.

In my frenzy of delight at the possibilities of escape I recollect
shaking hands effusively with Gunga Dass, after we had decided
that we were to make an attempt to get away that very night. It was
weary work waiting throughout the afternoon.

About ten o'clock, as far as I could judge, when the Moon had just
risen above the lip of the crater, Gunga Dass made a move for his
burrow to bring out the gun-barrels whereby to measure our path.
All the other wretched inhabitants had retired to their lairs long
ago. The guardian boat drifted downstream some hours before,
and we were utterly alone by the crow-clump. Gunga Dass, while
carrying the gun-barrels, let slip the piece of paper which was to be
our guide. I stooped down hastily to recover it, and, as I did so, I
was aware that the diabolical Brahmin was aiming a violent blow
at the back of my head with the gun-barrels. It was too late to turn
round. I must have received the blow somewhere on the nape of
my neck. A hundred thousand fiery stars danced before my eyes,
and I fell forwards senseless at the edge of, the quicksand.

When I recovered consciousness, the Moon was going down, and I
was sensible of intolerable pain in the back of my head. Gunga
Dass had disappeared and my mouth was full of blood. I lay down
again and prayed that I might die without more ado. Then the
unreasoning fury which I had before mentioned, laid hold upon
me, and I staggered inland toward the walls of the crater. It
seemed that some one was calling to me in a whisper-"Sahib!
Sahib! Sahib!" exactly as my bearer used to call me in the morning
I fancied that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at my feet.
Then I looked up and saw a head peering down into the
amphitheatre-the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to
my collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his
hand and showed a rope. I motioned. staggering to and fro for the
while, that he should throw it down. It was a couple of leather
punkah-ropes knotted together, with a loop at one end. I slipped
the loop over my head and under my arms; heard Dunnoo urge
something forward; was conscious that I was being dragged, face
downward, up the steep sand slope, and the next instant found
myself choked and half fainting on the sand hills overlooking the
crater. Dunnoo, with his face ashy grey in the moonlight, implored
me not to stay but to get back to my tent at once.

It seems that he had tracked Pornic's footprints fourteen miles
across the sands to the crater; had returned and told my servants,
who flatly refused to meddle with any one, white or black, once
fallen into the hideous Village of the Dead; whereupon Dunnoo
had taken one of my ponies and a couple of punkah-ropes, returned
to the crater, and hauled me out as I have described.

To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a
gold mohur a month-a sum which I still think far too little for the
services he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go
near that devilish snot again, or to reveal its whereabouts more
clearly than I have done. Of Gunga Dass I have never found a
trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive in giving this to be
published is the hope that some one may possibly identify, from
the details and the inventory which I have given above, the corpse
of the man in the olive-green hunting-suit.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING

Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy

The Law, as quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not
easy to follow. I have been fellow to a beggar again and again
under circumstances which prevented either of us finding out
whether the other was worthy. I have still to be brother to a Prince,
though I once came near to kinship with what might have been a
veritable King, and was promised the reversion of a Kingdom--
army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all complete. But, to-day, I
greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go
hunt it for myself.

The beginning of everything was in a railway-train upon the road
to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a Deficit in the Budget,
which necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is only half
as dear as First-Class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful
indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the
population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native,
which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is
amusing though intoxicated. Intermediates do not buy from
refreshment-rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and
buy sweets from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the
roadside water. This is why in hot weather Intermediates are taken
out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly
looked down upon.

My particular Intermediate happened to be empty till I reached
Nasirabad, when the big black-browed gentleman in shirt-sleeves
entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed the
time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but
with an educated taste for whisky. He told tales of things he had
seen and done, of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which
he had penetrated, and of adventures in which he risked his life for
a few days' food.

"If India was filled with men like you and me, not knowing more
than the crows where they'd get their next day's rations, it isn't
seventy millions of revenue the land would be paying--it's seven
hundred millions," said he; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I
was disposed to agree with him.

We talked politics,--the politics of Loaferdom that sees things
from the under side where the lath and plaster is not smoothed
off,--and we talked postal arrangements because my friend wanted
to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, the turning-
off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel
westward. My friend had no money beyond eight annas which he
wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in
the Budget before mentioned. Further, I was going into a
wilderness where, though I should resume touch with the Treasury,
there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore, unable to help
him in any way.

"We might threaten a Station-master, and make him send a wire on
tick," said my friend, "but that'd mean inquiries for you and for me,
and I've got my hands full these days. Did you say you were
travelling back along this line within any days?"

"Within ten," I said.

"Can't you make it eight?" said he. "Mine is rather urgent
business."

"I can send your telegrams within ten days if that will serve you," I
said.

"I couldn't trust the wire to fetch him, now I think of it. It's this
way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rd for Bombay. That means he'll be
running through Ajmir about the night of the 23rd."

"But I'm going into the Indian Desert," I explained.

"Well and good," said he. "You'll be changing at Marwar Junction
to get into Jodhpore territory,--you must do that,--and he'll be
coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th
by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on that time?
'T won't be inconveniencing you, because I know that there's
precious few pickings to be got out of these Central India States--
even though you pretend to be correspondent of the
'Backwoodsman.' "

"Have you ever tried that trick?" I asked.

"Again and again, but the Residents find you out, and then you get
escorted to the Border before you've time to get your knife into
them. But about my friend here. I must give him a word o' mouth
to tell him what's come to me, or else he won't know where to go. I
would take it more than kind of you if you was to come out of
Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to
him, 'He has gone South for the week.' He'll know what that
means. He's a big man with a red beard, and a great swell he is.

You'll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage
round him in a Second-class apartment. But don't you be afraid.

Slip down the window and say, 'He has gone South for the week,'

and he'll tumble. It's only cutting your time of stay in those parts by
two days. I ask you as a stranger--going to the West," he said, with
emphasis.

"Where have you come from?" said I.

"From the East," said he, "and I am hoping that you will give him
the message on the Square--for the sake of my Mother as well as
your own."

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of
their mothers; but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent,
I saw fit to agree.

"It's more than a little matter," said he, "and that's why I asked you
to do it--and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A
Second- class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man
asleep in it. You'll be sure to remember. I get out at the next
station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I
want."

"I'll give the message if I catch him," I said, "and for the sake of
your Mother as well as mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't
try to run the Central India States just now as the correspondent of
the 'Backwoodsman.' There's a real one knocking about here, and it
might lead to trouble."

"Thank you," said he, simply; "and when will the swine be gone? I
can't starve because he's ruining my work. I wanted to get hold of
the Degumber Rajah down here about his father's widow, and give
him a jump."

"What did he do to his father's widow, then?"

"Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she
hung from a beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man
that would dare going into the State to get hush-money for it.

They'll try to poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I
went on the loot there. But you'll give the man at Marwar Junction
my message?"

He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard,
more than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers
and bleeding small Native States with threats of exposure, but I
had never met any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and
generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a
wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw light
on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to
choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their
mind with four-in-hand barouches. They do not understand that
nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native
States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent
limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or diseased from one
end of the year to the other. They are the dark places of the earth,
full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the
Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-
Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and
in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I
wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals,
drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out
upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made
of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same
rug as my servant. It was all in the day's work.

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as
I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar
Junction, where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed
railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a
short halt at Marwar. She arrived just as I got in, and I had just
time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There was
only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window and
looked down upon a flaming-red beard, half covered by a railway-
rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs.

He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light of the lamps.

It was a great and shining face.

"Tickets again?" said he.

"No," said I. "I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week.

He has gone South for the week!"

The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes.

"He has gone South for the week," he repeated. "Now that's just
like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything?
'Cause I won't."

"He didn't," I said, and dropped away, and watched the red lights
die out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was
blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train--not an
Intermediate carriage this time--and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept
it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of
having done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not
do any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of
newspapers, and might, if they blackmailed one of the little rat-
trap States of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves
into serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe
them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be
interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later
informed, in having them headed back from the Degumber
borders.

Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there
were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a
newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable
sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission
ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his
duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a
perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed
for command sit down and sketch the outline of a series of ten,
twelve, or twenty- four leading articles on Seniority versus
Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been
permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse, and swear
at a brother missionary under special patronage of the editorial
We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they
cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New
Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent
punka-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable
swords and axletrees call with specifications in their pockets and
hours at their disposal; tea companies enter and elaborate their
prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball committees
clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully
described; strange ladies rustle in and say, "I want a hundred lady's
cards printed at once, please," which is manifestly part of an
Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the
Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as
a proof- reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing
madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires
are saying, "You're another," and Mister Gladstone is calling down
brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black
copyboys are whining, "kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh" ("Copy wanted"), like
tired bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred's shield.

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