WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
ince," Scott replied, with equal gravity. "I hoped to be put on the Luni Protective Works this cold weather, but there 's no saying how long the famine may keep us."
"Hardly beyond October, I should think," said Martyn. "It will be ended, one way or the other, then."
"And we 've nearly a week of this," said William. "Sha'n't we be dusty when it 's over?"
For a night and a day they knew their surroundings, and for a night and a day, skirting the edge of the great Indian Desert on a narrow-gauge railway, they remembered how in the days of their apprenticeship they had come by that road from Bombay. Then the languages in which the names of the stations were written changed, and they launched south into a foreign land, where the very smells were new. Many long and heavily laden grain-trains were in front of them, and they could feel the hand of Jimmy Hawkins from far off. They waited in extemporised sidings while processions of empty trucks returned to the north, and were coupled on to slow, crawling trains, and dropped at midnight, Heaven knew where; but it was furiously hot, and they walked to and fro among sacks, and dogs howled. Then they came to an India more strange to them than to the untravelled Englishman—the flat, red India of palm-tree, palmyra-palm, and rice—the India of the picture-books, of "Little Harry and His Bearer"—all dead and dry in the baking heat. They had left the incessant passenger-traffic of the north and west far and far behind them. Here the people crawled
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