IN Dehra the Brownes were within sight of the promised land, not always but often. Sometimes it lay quite hidden in some indefinable matted cloud-region of the sky, and then the last of the September rains came pelting down the Doon. Sometimes it thrust only a shoulder out of its cloud garments, and sometimes white fleeces swept over it from morning till night. But there were other days when the clouds sailed high above it, trailing their shadows after them, and then indeed the Brownes could climb to it by a winding road that began at their very feet. The road ascended to Mussoorie, which twinkled white on a spur above them seven thousand feet up, and twelve miles off. It would have been perfectly easy and practicable for them to go to Mussoorie; so easy and practicable that they didn’t go. When young Browne had looked after the planter’s tea-bushes, and put a headstone to his grave, and settled his bills and written home to his people the details of his affairs, there were eight days over. Mussoorie, the particular paradise of “quiet” people and retired old gentlemen who mean to die in the country, was an insignificant achievement for eight days. The Brownes surveyed the great brown flanks of the hills and burned for a wider conquest. They would go to Chakrata, high in the heart of the Himalayas to the west, half way to Simla. They would ride on horseback all the way up and down again to the railway station at Saharanpore; it would be more than a hundred miles—an expedition, as young Browne remarked, that they could dine out on for weeks when they got back to Calcutta. His own statement of their equipment for the journey is succinct. “We shall want,” said he, “two ponies, two syces, and an ekka. The ekka will take the luggage, bedding, Kasi, and the tiffin-basket. The ponies will take us, and the syces will come along behind. Let us go and hire them.”

They drove out the long shady main road of Dehra, creeping always upward to Rajpore, upon this business, and on the way Mr. Browne explained to Mrs. Browne the natural history, character and antecedents of the “bazar tat.” “They run small,” said young Browne, “mostly ears and tails. They have a tendency to displace objects to the rear of them, and a taste for human flesh. They were born and brought up in the bazar, and their morals are unspeakable. But you can’t get morals at any price in the bazar; they are too expensive to be sold there. And there’s no real harm in the bazar tat, if you only keep away from his heels and look a bit spry when you get on.”

Mrs. Browne asked, with concealed anxiety, if there were no donkeys. She was accustomed to a donkey, she said; she could ride one really rather well, and if George didn’t mind she would so much prefer it. But George answered in a spirit of ribaldry. The only donkeys in India, he said, belonged to the dhobies, and were permanently engaged in taking home the wash. By that time they had arrived. It was only a sharp elbow of a narrow mountain road, Rajpore, with its tumble-down houses, overhanging it on both sides, and it was quite empty. “There aren’t any horses here!” Helen remarked with disparagement.

“Wait,” returned her husband. Then, with really no particular emphasis, he said, “Gorah!”^[131] to Rajpore.

“Ha, hazur!”

“Good pony, sahib!”

“Here iz, memsahib—here iz!”

Rajpore human on innumerable pairs of brown legs, turned suddenly into the best and most spacious of its ground floors, dragging thence Rajpore equine hostile on four, wearing an aggrieved expression above clinging strands of country grass. They came, and still they came, from above trotting down, from below trotting up. A human being of sorts was usually attached to them, but Rajpore was obviously inhabited by ponies. No other census would have been worth taking there. Mrs. Browne was surrounded by ragged turbans and man-eaters. With Mr. Browne’s anxious hand upon her arm she felt herself precipitated in every direction at once. “I can’t keep out of the way of all their heels, George,” she exclaimed in the voice of the tried woman, and then George backed her carefully against a wall, drew a semicircle round her with a diameter of five feet, and forbade man or beast to cross the line. Then they proceeded to a choice.

“Here iz, hazur! Good nice thin wallah, memsahib kawasti!”^[132]

“Thanks,” said Helen; “he’s a diagram! I want a fat one.”

“Look, memsahib! This one bote plenty fat. Rose, rose, tarty bun’nles ghas khata!”^[133]

“He’s a baote-tamasha-wallah,” remarked young Browne. “Look at his eye, Helen. He also appears to have kicked all his skin off his fetlocks. For you I should prefer the diagram.”

Finally it was the diagram for Helen, who commanded that an unreasonable quantity of food should be given to it under her eyes, and remained until it was finished. “If she isn’t fatter after that,” she said with satisfaction, “it’s her own fault.” Young Browne selected the veritable charger of Rajpore. He wore his mouth and nose carefully tied up in rope, and might be relied upon at all points so long as that one remained secure. “They’re not much of a pair,” said young Browne, “but in your animal, dear, I don’t mind sacrificing both speed and appearances.”

“To safety. Yes, dear, you are perfectly right.” And Mrs. Browne, whose sense of humour was imperfectly developed, regarded her husband with affection.

Thereafter it became a question of an ekka, and Rajpore had ekkas bewildering in their variety and in their disrepair. If you have never seen an ekka it will be difficult for you to understand one. The business ekka does not stand about to be photographed, and therefore you must be told that, although it appears to rest mainly on the horse’s back, it has two wheels generally, one on each side. There is a popular saying that no sahib likes a one-wheeled ekka, and though it is a popular saying it is true. The vehicle will do prodigious distances with one wheel, but it is anticipating Providence to engage it on that basis. An ekka is rather like a very old two-storied birdcage tilted up and fore-shortened, with a vaulted roof, and it runs in my mind that the roof is frescoed. The upstanding little posts at the four corners are certainly painted red and yellow; they are carved also, like the rungs of certain chairs. I know that the ekka-wallah sits in the upper story smiling upon the world. An ekka-wallah always smiles; his is a life of ease. I know too that there are bulgings above and protuberances below, and half a yard of dirty sacking, and seven pieces of ragged rope, and always room for something else; but at this point my impression becomes a little confused, and I cannot state with assurance which end is attached to the horse. That, however, is a matter of detail. The real point is that the Brownes found an ekka apparently two feet square, which contracted to carry their luggage, bedding, tiffin-basket, and Kasi up to Chakrata and down to the plains for the sum of three rupees per diem, which was extortionate. But the pulthans^[134] were moving down, and the sergeants’ wives would require many ekkas. They could afford to wait for the sergeants’ wives. In expectation of these ladies the ekka market was a solid unit and the Brownes succumbed before it.

Next day they left Dehra, dropping the first of its October rose-leaves. Thinking of the planter in his grave, Helen wondered how he could have been so indifferent as to close his eyes wilfully and intentionally on such a place. It was the morning, there was a sweet and pungent gaiety in the air, the long road they had to travel stretched before them in the pleasaunce of leaf-checkered sunshine. Little striped squirrels played on the boles of the trees—they were English-looking trees—that met over their heads. Young Browne thanked God audibly that they were out of the region of palms and plantains.

Tiny green fly-catchers swung on the rushes of an occasional pool, pink-breasted ring-doves sidled out of their way, thieving parrots flew by sixes and sevens screaming up from the kharif crops.^[135] Very green were the kharif crops, with the rain still about their roots, surging up under the lowest branches of the trees as far as these travellers could see before them. But for the teeming luxuriance of everything, the sense of breadth and brightness and the caressing sun, it might have been a road in Devonshire. But for the wayfarers too. There were neither smocks nor gigs; the ryot went by, chiefly dressed in his own brown skin, urging his lean oxen; all the gentle cows had curious humps between their shoulders. And here by the wayside they saw the tiny dome of a battered white praying place, and there the square slab of a Mahomedan tomb.

The sun grew hot as they scrambled with the road down to the bridge across a broad river bed full of round white stones and boulders, with a narrow shallow brown stream hurrying along the middle. Further away it trickled into the Jumna; here it played with pebbles and crabs, but now and then in the rains it brought the boulders down from the mountains swirling, and threw stones at the Department of Public Works, and shook the bridges. Looking one way as they crossed the bridge, it was a piled-up picture, the blue hills massed behind, the big white stones huddled and stranded in the glistening grey sand, the foolish little stream in the middle. Looking the other, the picture went to pieces, the hills sloped further away, the sky came down, the big stones rounded themselves into little ones, and spread indistinguishably far. Either way it was beautiful in the crisp Indian sunlight; it had a gay untroubled life, like porcelain.

After that there were miles of irresponsible curving, weedy road, that led them sometimes past the sirkar’s^[136] sarl forest, and sometimes past a little village gathered together under a mango-tree, but oftenest it straggled through wide, sunny, stony country, full of pale half-tints, where only wild grasses grew. Such tall wild grasses, purple and yellow and white, bending and tufting above their heads on either side of the way. “They would make Aunt Plovtree happy for life,” Helen said. They would indeed, and many another estimable lady resident in Great Britain. It was a sorrowful waste that they should be growing there far from the solemn interiors that yearned for their dusty charms. Helen was so much of this opinion that she dismounted and gathered a bunch, compelling her husband to do the same, to send by parcel post to Aunt Plovtree. She flicked the flies off the Diagram’s ears with them for three miles, then she lost a third of them in a canter, and young Browne arranged that the rest should be carefully forgotten at Kalsi dÂk-bungalow. He was of opinion that in undertaking an ascent of nine thousand feet on a bazar tat in India you couldn’t be expected to gather and preserve wild grasses for your aunt in England.