“All aboard the te-rain—for Lahore, Rawalpindi, and the North!”
Fifteen times he had blown his shiny, official silver whistle.
Fifteen minutes it had taken to solve the quarrel between the railway people and the Tamerlani; fifteen more to rescue some of the former from the hands of a party of ruffianly, drunken Rajputs whom they had tried to overcharge.
And yet another fifteen minutes elapsed before the train finally got under way with a wheezy cough.
For this was India, this was the East, to whom all Time, including railway time tables, also including the eternities, is only a matter of yawn and stretch and shrug, and to whom hurry is an ungentlemanly pastime of Western barbarians.
On then, to the North!
Through the stark, swollen, heat-scorched yellowness of Bengal, with fleeting glimpses of blue-garbed natives tilling the fields and patient buffaloes turning the water wheels and once in a while a squat, shimmering city seen vaguely through the delicate tracery of the trees!
A night and a day and another night, during which Hector saw nothing of the princess who, since there were Christians and Hindus and Eurasians, foreigners all, aboard, was respecting the proper customs of purdah and harem, of veil and woman's seclusion under the Nubian's jealous eyes, but who sent him frequent, joyful, hopeful messages through the servants who brought him food … while the train
