No More Learning

" (Here the crow
demanded his attention for an instant as it twirled before the fire in
danger of being burned to a cinder. ) "If you die at home and do not die
when you come to the ghat to be burned you come here. "

The nature of the reeking village was made plain now, and all that I had
known or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the fact
just communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first
landed in Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the
existence, somewhere in India, of a place to which such Hindus as had
the misfortune to recover from trance or catalepsy were conveyed and
kept, and I recollect laughing heartily at what I was then pleased to
consider a traveler's tale.

Sitting at the bottom of the sand-trap, the memory of Watson's Hotel,
with its swinging punkahs, white-robed attendants, and the sallow-faced
Armenian, rose up in my mind as vividly as a photograph, and I burst
into a loud fit of laughter. The contrast was too absurd!

Gunga Dass, as he bent over the unclean bird, watched me curiously.
Hindus seldom laugh, and his surroundings were not such as to move Gunga
Dass to any undue excess of hilarity. He removed the crow solemnly
from the wooden spit and as solemnly devoured it. Then he continued his
story, which I give in his own words:

"In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burned almost before
you are dead. When you come to the riverside the cold air, perhaps,
makes you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on
your nose and mouth and you die conclusively. If you are rather more
alive, more mud is put; but if you are too lively they let you go
and take you away. I was too lively, and made protestation with anger
against the indignities that they endeavored to press upon me. In those
days I was Brahmin and proud man.

"Now I am dead man and eat"--here he eyed the well-gnawed breast
bone with the first sign of emotion that I had seen in him since we
met--"crows, and other things.
They took me from my sheets when they saw
that I was too lively and gave me medicines for one week, and I survived
successfully. Then they sent me by rail from my place to Okara Station,
with a man to take care of me; and at Okara Station we met two other
men, and they conducted we three on camels, in the night, from Okara
Station to this place, and they propelled me from the top to the bottom,
and the other two succeeded, and I have been here ever since two and a
half years. Once I was Brahmin and proud man, and now I eat crows. "

"There is no way of getting out? "

"None of what kind at all. When I first came I made experiments
frequently and all the others also, but we have always succumbed to the
sand which is precipitated upon our heads. "

"But surely," I broke in at this point, "the river-front is open, and
it is worth while dodging the bullets; while at night"--I had already
matured a rough plan of escape which a natural instinct of selfishness
forbade me sharing with Gunga Dass. He, however, divined my
unspoken thought almost as soon as it was formed; and, to my intense
astonishment, gave vent to a long low chuckle of derision--the laughter,
be it understood, of a superior or at least of an equal.

"You will not"--he had dropped the Sir completely after his opening
sentence--"make any escape that way. But you can try. I have tried. Once
only. "

The sensation of nameless terror and abject fear which I had in vain
attempted to strive against overmastered me completely. My long fast--it
was now close upon ten o'clock, and I had eaten nothing since tiffin on
the previous day--combined with the violent and unnatural agitation of
the ride had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes,
I acted as one mad. I hurled myself against the pitiless sand-slope. I
ran round the base of the crater, blaspheming and praying by turns.