The new year was already some hours old, but the world to which it had come was still dark. Dark with a curious obscurity, that was absolutely opaque yet faintly luminous, because of the white fog which lay on all things and hid them from the stars; for the sky above was clear, cold, almost frosty.

That was why the fog, born, not of cool vapour seeking for cloud life among the winds of heaven, but of hot smoke loving the warmth of dust and ashes, clung so closely to the earth; to its birthplace.

It was an acrid, bitter smoke, not even due to the dead hearthfires of a dead day, since they--like all else pertaining to the domestic life of India--give small outward sign of existence, but to the smouldering piles of litter and refuse which are lit every evening upon the outskirts of human habitation. Dull heaps with a minimum of fire, a maximum of smoke, where the humanity which has produced the litter, the refuse, gathers for gossip or for warmth.

Even in the fields beyond the multitude of men, where some long-limbed peasant, watching his hope of harvest, dozes by a solitary fire, this same smoke rises in a solid column, until--beaten down by the colder moister air above--it drifts sideways to spread like a vast cobweb over the dew-set carpet of green corn.

So it was small wonder if here, at Nushapore, with its fifty thousand and odd dwellers in cantonments, its two hundred and odd thousand dwellers in the town, the smoke fog hid earth from heaven; hid even the steady coming of day.

For it was close on dawn. The most silent, most restful hour of an Indian night, yet one still holding that vague sense of life and movement inseparable from an environment in which there is no set time for sleeping or waking; in which folk gossip all night, and sleep all day, should the humour so take them.

It had so seized on some one, apparently, this New Year's night, for two voices rose, not in whispers, but monotone, from one of the verandahs in Government House--rose insistently, until, from within the closed doors, came a sharp though drowsy order for silence--

'Chupra'o!'

The voices ceased; such orders, even when drowsy, must be obeyed, since they come from the master: at any rate, till he sleeps again.

So the minutes slipped by. Upon the round rim of the level wheatfields beyond the smoke, the violet sky above the cobwebs faded to grey at the sun's approach. The fog round Nushapore grew whiter, more luminous.

Then the voices began again; monotonous, insistent. Were they, in old-world fashion, beguiling the reality of darkness with legends of some heroic age of light? Were they, more modernly, making that reality darker by taking thought for the morrow, and discussing, say, the depreciation of the rupee? Or were they dreamers still, though wakeful, and were they discoursing of equality and the rights of the individual? Such theories are to be heard nowadays even in this Indian smoke fog.

'Chupra'o, you brutes, or----'

The threatening voice paused as a dull reverberation shivered through the chill air. It was the first gun of the Imperial salute which every New Year's morning proclaims that Victoria, Kaiser-i-hind, reigns over the fog, and the voices in it.

Now, when a hundred and one guns, each with its message of mastery, stand between a man and his sleep, what use is there in commanding silence elsewhere?

So the threat ceased, and between the beats of the guns the voices had their say unchecked.

About what?

That is a difficult question to answer, when the voices are in the night.