Time rolled on — the torrid season was coming fast, while rich crops ready for the sickle waved in the hot winds then setting in. By degrees the harvest was garnered, and the country shorn of its vegetation wore a dreary aspect. Its genial charm was gone; where bountiful fields had been, there were now bare flat plains. The atmosphere day by day increased to a fiercer heat, and the whole face of the visible earth dazzled the eye that looked upon it. The bracing cold weather, in fact, had been succeeded by the flaming furnace that blazes over Upper India during its “summer” months.
Without the slightest exaggeration, it may be safely said that no one who has not himself had personal experience of the open-air heat of the above-mentioned region, can form any conception of its intensity. In the compass of the heavens, without a cloud even as diminutive as a butterfly to screen his blinding rays, the sun appears from day to day, and for months, like an enormous ruby set in a burnished dome of brass, whence descends a fiery glow almost akin to that derivable from the focus of a burning-glass. There was no thermometer in the camp, but it required no meteorologist to pronounce what the temperature would have registered in the shade about noon; no less than from a hundred and thirty, to a hundred and forty degrees, we were sure. But all Englishmen stimulated by necessity, “the mother of invention,” are not dilatory in discovering solutions for their difficulties — especially when they are abroad. So we
