"Look you! The scoffers mocked at my doll, but the _Huzoors_ understand. The _sahib_ himself has taken it to send to the little _sahibs_, and the _mem_ packed it up herself and went with him, instead of going in the Captain _sahib's_ dogcart. That is because a doll is always a doll; as for glass eyes and such like, they perish."
And with that he crushed a handful of withered red poinsettias into the rubbish basket triumphantly.
The engine was conscientiously climbing to the level plateau which stretches between Bhopal and Bandakui, when I heard this story.
Ten minutes before, apparently for no other purpose save to supply the first-class passengers with their early cup of tea, the mail train had stopped at a desolate little station which consisted of a concrete-arched, oven-like shed, made still more obtrusively unfitted for the wilderness in which it stood by a dejected bottle-gourd striving to climb up it.
Here a wistful-faced old man in spotless white raiment had appeared in the dawn with a tray of tea and toast. There were four cups of tea and only two passengers; myself and a man who had already been asleep on one side of the carriage when I took possession of the other at Bhopal. So we saw each other for the first time as we sate up in our sleeping suits among our blankets and pillows. As the train moved on, in a series of dislocations which sent half my tea into my saucer, we left the wistful old face looking at the two unsold cups of tea regretfully, and I wished I had bought the lot. It seemed such a pathetic group to leave there in the wilderness, backed by a European oven and a climbing gourd.
And it was a wilderness. Miles and miles of it all the same. Piles of red rocks, blackened on the upper surface, scattered, as if they had been shot from a cart, among dry bents and stunted bushes; curious bushes with a plenitude of twig and a paucity of leaf. Here and there was a still more stunted tree with a paucity of both: a rudimentary tree, splay, gouty, with half-a-dozen or so of kidney-shaped lobes in place of foliage, parched, dusty, unwholesome.
Not a level country, but one dented into causeless dells, raised into irrelevant hillocks; both, however, trending almost imperceptibly upwards, so that the eye, deceived by this, imagined greater things on the horizon.