We went to Poona and spent a night in the National Hotel. I will never forget that night if I live a thousand years. We retired at ten o'clock. By eleven I had killed forty-two bed-bugs. This is not an estimate: it is actual count. I didn't ask the proprietor for another bed for I thought all of them would be alike and I estimated that I had killed off nearly all the bugs in my present bed. At midnight I had slaughtered sixty-seven. This is not a parlour subject, I know. But we are not in a parlour. We are in an Indian bedroom. I would raise up the bed-clothes, light the lamp and they would flock in all directions, like the ribs of a fan, to get under cover. At one o'clock I had killed eighty-one. There seemed to be no end. I couldn't stand it any longer. I tried to rout out the proprietor but he was asleep and couldn't be found. I returned to my room and made my couch on the floor. The mosquitoes nearly finished me during the rest of the night. I venture the guess that this hotel entertains only transients. One night is enough.
We drove in a _tonga_, a two-wheeled cart, to the Karli Cave. This excavation is made out of a solid rock and is said to have been done two hundred years before Christ. It resembles an early Christian church in its arrangement and all the dimensions are similar to those of the choir of Norwich Cathedral.
It was our plan to catch the mail train for Bombay. On our return from the cave one of the shafts of the _tonga_ broke. The driver was unable to mend it. We had six miles to go to the station and we had but little time. We estimated what the _tonga_ had been worth, paid the driver and left him in the road. We ran the entire six miles through a heavy tropical rain. The heat was intense and the atmosphere was sultry and close. Drenched to the skin we arrived at the station only to see the rear-end of the train pulling out of the yards. Two hours later we took a slow train for Bombay.
Driving a bargain in India takes time, if nothing else. All merchants charge what the traffic will bear. Richardson and I wanted two deck chairs and made up our minds that we were going to get them at a fair price. One evening I dropped into a native shop to look over the stock.