No More Learning

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. I
crawled out among the sedges of the river-front, only to be driven back
each time in an agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets which cut
up the sand round me--for I dared not face the death of a mad dog among
that hideous crowd--and finally fell, spent and raving, at the curb of
the well. No one had taken the slightest notion of an exhibition which
makes me blush hotly even when I think of it now.

Two or three men trod on my panting body as they drew water, but they
were evidently used to this sort of thing, and had no time to waste
upon me. The situation was humiliating. Gunga Dass, indeed, when he had
banked the embers of his fire with sand, was at some pains to throw half
a cupful of fetid water over my head, an attention for which I could
have fallen on my knees and thanked him, but he was laughing all the
while in the same mirthless, wheezy key that greeted me on my first
attempt to force the shoals. And so, in a semi-comatose condition, I lay
till noon.