drugs in his little brass-bound box, ascending Shamlegh slope, a just man made perfect. Watch him, all Babudom laid aside, smoking at noon on a cot, while a woman with turquoise-studded headgear points south-easterly across the bare grass. Litters, she says, do not travel as fast as single men, but his birds should now be in the plains. The Holy Man would not stay though she pressed him. The Babu groans ponderously, girds up his huge loins, and is off again. He does not care to travel after dusk; but his days' marches—there is none to enter them in a book—would astonish folk who laugh at his race. Kindly villages, remembering the Dacca drug-vendor of two months ago, give him shelter against evil spirits of the wood. He dreams of Bengali gods, University text-books of his education, and the Royal Society, London, England. Next dawn the bobbing blue-and-white umbrella goes forward.
On the edge of the Doon, Mussoorie well behind them and the plains laid out in golden dusk before, rests a worn litter in which—all the hills know it—lies a sick lama who seeks a River for his healing. Villages have almost come to blows for the honour of bearing it, and not only has the lama given them blessings, but his disciple good money—full one-third Sahib's prices. Twelve miles a day has the dooli travelled, as the greasy, rubbed pole-ends show, and by roads that few Sahibs use. Over the Nilang Pass in storm when the driven snow-dust filled every fold of the impassive lama's drapery; between the black horns of Raieng—where they heard the whistle of the wild goats through the clouds; pitching and strained on the shale below; hard held between shoulder and clenched jaw when they rounded the hideous curves of the Cut Road above Bhagirati; swinging and creaking to the steady jog-trot of the descent into the Valley of the Waters; pressed along the steamy
