Nizams Daughters mh-2

by Allan Mallinson

  Templer was about to leave, and Hervey and Locke with him, when there came another of what Somervile called India’s infinite curiosities. A solitary trail of dust, not very high, first revealed the presence on the road from the east. One by one the soldiers of the patrol turned to watch, until all were fixed on the little bullock cart as it made its slow way towards them. Two of the thinnest-looking oxen Hervey had seen, yoked side by side and standing no higher at the shoulder than Jessye as a yearling, plodded patiently before the hackery, their cream-coloured tails swaying with the movement of their quarters but otherwise still, not yet needed for relief from the plague of flies that would beset them in an hour or so. And in the cart itself sat a shrivelled little figure, sun-hatted, smiling. Without any apparent urging, the oxen made for the shade of a banyan at the edge of the village, and there they stopped. The little man took off his hat and bowed his head.

  Hervey looked quizzically at the collector.

  ‘The priest,’ explained Somervile.

  ‘Ah,’ said Hervey. ‘I had imagined someone more…’

  ‘The Catholic priest, I mean.’

  ‘Catholic priest? I had not imagined—’

  ‘Well, do not suppose the roots are as deep as St Thomas would have wished. In these villages it is but a superficial creed — to the unread ryots merely an intelligible alternative to unintelligible Hindoo. The Virgin Mary is to them but a beneficent goddess, and the transition from Krishna to Christ is one which offers no material difficulty to their limited faculties.’

  It seemed a harsh judgement, but it was said with kindness. ‘Where does he come from?’

  ‘Who knows?’ shrugged Somervile. ‘The cart is his travelling residence, but beyond that… Rajahmundry perhaps? But priests were ministering here before the French came. And he will go on ministering and hoping for the best until he dies. And then a few sticks with rags tied to them will decorate his grave, and he will rank as a departed fakir or yogi.’

  The collector seemed full of admiration. Hervey would never have thought it.

  ‘Oh, mistake me not, sir. I do not hold with any faith, but I cannot but be moved by the devotion of these bullock-cart priests — and the constancy of their flock by return. There are easier things to be in India than a native Christian.’

  The noise was like that which the greenhead recruit makes when, wagered by the sweats that he cannot get a clear note from a bugle, he blows hard with full lungs and open lips in a terrible, straining distress-call. Except that no human lungs could blow so long and so loud.

  ‘Elephant, sahib,’ said Subedar Thangraj, seeing Hervey’s astonished look. ‘Elephant very angry, very not-content.’

  Hervey had somehow supposed elephants to be entirely mute. There had been no reason to suppose otherwise. The stuffed specimen in Mr Bullock’s Museum of Natural and Artificial Curiosities, at No. 22 Piccadilly, had engaged him a full quarter of an hour when he had visited with d’Arcey Jessope two years before, but had, naturally, revealed nothing of its stentorian powers. And those living beasts that tramped, with the greatest docility, along the thoroughfares of Madras and Guntoor had likewise made not a sound. He now supposed they must bellow like cattle, and was suspicious at first of the subedar’s assurance that the noise came, indeed, trumpet-like from the animal’s trunk. Johnson had once assured him that an elephant was able to prospect for precious stones in the ground, and Lieutenant Locke now insisted, even more improbably, that elephants were able to throw stones with great accuracy at a mark.

  The Sukri river, explained Templer, was the border between the princely state of Chintal and the Northern Circars, and there was held to be common title to its waters. Thus it was not evident whence the distressed elephant, thrashing knee-deep at the edge of the river with its attendants, had come.

  ‘Elephant fussunded, sahib,’ concluded Subedar Thangraj.

  Hervey looked at Templer, to whom the problem did not seem novel. ‘Mud or quicksand it will be,’ said the cornet. ‘The great beast will have sunk and struggled, and now he will be well and truly stuck.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ asked Hervey, assuming they must do something.

  ‘I’ve seen a gaur caught this way. I fear there’s nothing we can do that is not already being done,’ he replied, indicating the ropes on which the attendants were pulling as the elephant continued its trumpeting as loud as before, and its two companions on the far bank added to the uproar.

  ‘Save me, O God: for the waters are come in, even unto my soul.’

  Cornet Templer looked at him strangely.

  ‘Psalm Sixty-nine,’ explained Hervey, with something between a smile and a grimace. ‘ “I stick fast in the deep mire, where no ground is: I am come into deep waters, so that the floods run over me.” ’

  ‘And does the psalmist have any notion of how the elephant may be delivered from the mire, sir?’ asked Templer, smiling too.

  Hervey racked his brain for the rest of the psalm — one of the longer ones. ‘ “As for me, when I am poor and in heaviness: thy help, O God, shall lift me up.” ’

  ‘Then we had better go and do God’s work down there, sir,’ laughed Templer. ‘Subedar sahib — shoulders to it!’

  The attendants had cut grass and branches from the few trees thereabouts, and had thrown them for the elephant to tread on. But it had been no use. They even tore planks from a ferry moored nearby and put them in reach of his trunk, but he seized each one and angrily threw it aside.

  ‘Elephant will tear off his mahout to step on, sahib, if he has need,’ said the subedar; ‘it is most strange he will not take planks. Better for stay clear, sahib.’

  The attendants — a dozen or more — were now hitching the ropes to the two other elephants in a last bid to haul out the stricken animal.

  ‘That will cut through to the bone, surely,’ said Hervey, seeing them only manage to secure a line round one leg. He sprang from the saddle, unable to remain a spectator any longer — even if he had no other ideas.

  Templer and the subedar dismounted too. ‘I think we could wedge some of those planks under his belly to prevent his sinking any further,’ said the cornet.

  Subedar Thangraj barked orders to the attendants and the patrol. He had advised they kept their distance, but now that his cornet had decided on this course of action he would direct the operation with all the vigour the sahibs would expect. Meanwhile, Templer and Hervey removed their boots and jackets to cross the quicksand.

  The attendants spoke a dialect unintelligible even to the subedar, but several understood Hervey’s Urdu and in a few minutes, with the help of half a dozen sepoys, they succeeded in getting up a platform around the beast, with wedging planks angled under its great bulk. By now, however, the elephant had sunk so deep that all but a part of his back and head were under the sand. He could no longer struggle, only wave his trunk in the air and trumpet feebly — though the clamour of the attendants and the calls of the other two elephants were as strong as before.

  ‘Sahib, elephant will soon go under quicksand. Better for we shoot him now and take him from his misery,’ said the subedar.

  When Templer put this to the attendants they howled in protest and waved their hands about in horror. It was only then that Hervey, who had been standing on the platform for some minutes, dismayed that he could not think of any solution to the worsening problem, thought that he might have an answer. ‘Great heavens!’ he exclaimed, as it occurred to him. ‘Templer, do you remember your Ovid?’

  Cornet Templer was taken aback.

  ‘Come, man: how did Hercules cleanse the Augean stables?’

  Templer thought a moment. ‘He diverted the river through them. But what—’

  Hervey did not let him finish. ‘See, there’s a bend in the river yonder,’ he said, pointing upstream; ‘we can cut a channel and let in water. It should loosen the quicksand and we might then be able to get him out — that, or it will be over quickly for the wretched beast.’

  Templer gave the ord
ers at once to Subedar Thangraj. He in turn got the sepoys and others who had gathered on the bank to work with their bare hands, and in half an hour they had made the cutting, and water began to flow towards the fussunded elephant. At first it looked as though all that would happen was the merciful drowning of the beast, now utterly exhausted and seemingly resigned to its fate, but after a few more minutes the quicksand started to loosen. The attendants put ropes around the animal’s quarters and the combined strength of fifty men and two elephants now braced for a final effort. The water was fast rising, and the ropes might not bear the strain. But at the signal, all pulled as if their own lives depended on it — and out he came, like a cork from a bottle.

  The beast was done for. He had been stuck fast for a full five hours and every rib showed. He stood, swaying, as if he might collapse at any moment. ‘Brandy, Subedar sahib: fetch him some brandy,’ said Hervey.

  Subedar Thangraj found a bottle from the bat-horse packs and, mixed with water in a bucket, the brandy was proffered to the exhausted elephant by his mahout. And it seemed not without some effect, for although he continued to sway on his feet, he began to step from side to side, showing no sign of wanting to lie down. The attendants were overjoyed, and began an incoherent babbling which nevertheless conveyed appreciation of the sahibs’ ingenuity. And then suddenly there was excited pointing and more jabbering: ‘Salutri, sahib, salutri!’ shouted the one with some Urdu.

  Salutri? Hervey was baffled: where in all of Hindoostan were they to find a veterinarian? He tried to tell them this, but they pointed more insistently: ‘Salutri, salutri!’ Hervey turned to look — astounded.

  ‘Matthew Hervey, I never supposed for a moment that you would take my advice,’ said Selden as he rode up, followed by a half-dozen lancers, saffron pennants fluttering — the distinguishing colour of the princely state of Chintal.

  The last time Hervey had heard that voice was in Dover the best part of two years before. Hatless, he held his arm out to the side and made the smallest bow of his head, smiling with incredulity as he did so: ‘Mr Selden, by what providence is it that we should meet thus?’

  The salutri laughed. ‘Doubtless you would say it was the will of God, but I should not wish to debate divinity again with you — at least, not here. It is a great world into which we are born, but a small one in which we choose to live. Who are your friends?’

  ‘Oh, forgive me,’ said Hervey, conscious now of Templer and Locke standing silent next to him. ‘Let me present Mr Locke, lieutenant of Marines in His Majesty’s Ship Nisus, and Cornet Templer of the Madras Light Cavalry.’ Both made bows. ‘Gentlemen,’ continued Hervey, turning to them, ‘may I present Mr Selden, lately veterinary surgeon to the 6th Light Dragoons.’

  Selden, now dismounted, held out his hand to each. ‘Well, gentlemen,’ he said, smiling the while, ‘you are standing on the left bank of the Sukri. May I therefore welcome you on behalf of the Rajah of Chintal to his domain.’

  They expressed themselves grateful but explained that the crossing was unintentional. One of the mahouts began to talk rapidly in his own tongue, and Selden quizzed him with considerable fluency. He turned to Hervey again. ‘It appears, too, that I must thank you on the rajah’s behalf for rescuing one of his favourite hunting elephants. The rajah is a great shikari: we have been in these parts for a week’s sport and these elephants were bathing before their return to our hunting camp. Come, let me offer you some refreshment. Our camp is but a mile away, and we don’t strike until tomorrow, though the rajah has returned to Chintalpore, unfortunately — the Nizam of Haidarabad visits and there’s much to attend to.’

  Here was fortune indeed. He was met with Selden, an object of his mission to India, and a month, surely, before he might be able to do so through the offices of Calcutta. And the nizam himself was about to pay a visit to Chintalpore. Hervey was turning over the possibilities in his mind even as he accepted Selden’s invitation.

  Templer, however, was concerned for the propriety — and the legality — of Company troops entering the rajah’s domain, even with an invitation.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Hervey concluded, with as indifferent an air as he could manage, ‘it seems that Mr Templer shall have to return directly to Guntoor. However, Mr Locke and I accept with the greatest pleasure!’

  VII. FALSE CIVILIZATION

  Chintal, princely state

  The Rajah of Chintal’s hunting camp lay at the forest edge, where great mathi and tadasalu trees provided shade over the best part of three acres of mown grass. There were a dozen large tents, one bigger by half than the others, with saffron panels and streamers, evidently the rajah’s former quarters. In the middle of the camp was the maidan, on which several Arab ponies were being schooled by bare-legged riders. Xenophon would have approved, smiled Hervey, for they rode without saddle too, the sweat of the ponies’ flanks giving the necessary adhesion.

  ‘Come: you will feel the need of a bath,’ said Selden, as their horses were led away; and he called after one of the syces, in a tongue Hervey did not recognize, to fill two tubs for the sahibs.

  Hervey was glad of the offer, and Locke too, for the quicksand had a rankness that had travelled with them to the camp. And for a half-hour they each luxuriated in leaden baths of warm, perfumed spring water brought by relays from a huge vat heated by a charcoal fire. And to slake their thirsts a khitmagar brought silver cups of cold beer.

  ‘Upon my word,’ exclaimed Locke after his first, long, draught, ‘this is uncommonly good ale. This Chintal nabob has a damned fine brewer. And so cool it is too, as if it has been in a cellar. A man might be tolerably content in these parts!’

  It was a half-hour of indulgence. And all the more pleasurable for its being well earned.

  ‘Did you find the arrangements to your satisfaction, gentlemen?’ enquired Selden as they joined him outside his tent.

  They had. Towels, brushes and clean shirts from the rajah’s quarters, and breeches from the packs carried by the bat-horses, had made new men of them.

  ‘May I offer you more ale, or perhaps you would prefer wine?’

  Both preferred the cold hops.

  ‘An uncommonly good brew,’ said Locke again, emptying his cup in one motion, which a khitmagar refilled at once from a silver pitcher.

  ‘Yes,’ said Selden, with some satisfaction, ‘I too am fond of Burton ale.’

  Locke was intrigued. ‘You do not mean that which we call Burton ale, do you?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ Selden assured him. ‘The rajah is especially favoured of it. Twice yearly it is shipped from Madras at sixty rupees a dozen.’

  They made noises of appreciation, though at such a price Locke was not now so assured that a man might be advantageously set up here without a small fortune.

  The khansamah led them to the dinner table, which stood under the double shade of both a giant mathi and a saffron canopy. The table was so solid that even when Locke half-stumbled against it as they sat nothing was put awry. Had they been able to see beneath the crimson tablecloth, richly decorated as it was with images of the chase worked in semi-precious stones, they would have been astonished that anything so massive as this teak board, its legs carved voluptuously, might be brought to the jungle’s edge. The plates and flatware — everything, it seemed — were gold, and by this sumptuousness Hervey was left in no doubt as to the rajah’s rank and wealth, though he could not, with any certainty, discern thereby his character. He had seen like displays of nobility and wealth at Longleat and Lismore, albeit more restrained. His preference was still for a white tablecloth and silver; though how long might a man be in India, he wondered, before it was for brocades and gold?

  Henry Locke, evidently, was occupied by no such thoughts, setting about the fare without seeming much to notice the richness of the plate on which it was served. His thirst was already proving prodigious, and one khitmagar was engaged almost entirely in replenishing his cup. ‘How d’ye manage to chill it so thoroughly in this infernal heat?’ he
asked. ‘You cannot stand it in the river alone. That wouldn’t cool it thus.’

  ‘Ice,’ replied Selden in a matter-of-fact way. ‘The rajah has ice houses in Chintal and blocks of it are brought down here each night.’

  Hervey was minded of the ice cart in Chelsea, and how his arresting officer’s reserve had begun to thaw, with the ice, on that hot July morning. What an extraordinary change in his fortunes that day had seen. And what extraordinary circumstances had brought him since to this table at the edge of the jungle on the far side of the world. He could not help his thoughts wandering back to the vicarage garden in Wiltshire, where his father might now be pottering — perhaps to see the first snowdrops. His mother, his sister, and quite probably Mrs Strange too — all would be at some good work or other. And, of course, Henrietta. He could not suppose with any exactness what she might be doing, nor where she might be. London was not improbable at this time of year. Bath, too, perhaps — there were fashionable assemblies there throughout the winter. She might be at Chatsworth — the new duke was the staunchest of her friends. Indeed, she might be at any of two dozen great houses in England, for such was her beauty and wit that her company was constantly sought.

  Selden recalled him to the forest’s edge. ‘How do you find your fish, Hervey? I’ll warrant you’ve not tasted its like before.’