Expecting a kind of torture-house wherein he would be starved, sweated, thrashed by brutal kourbash-wielding overseers, he found the most palatial and comfortable of clubs, a place of perfect peace, safety, and ease, where one was kindly treated by those in authority, sumptuously fed, luxuriously lodged, and provided with pleasant occupation, attractive amusements and reasonable leisure.

He had always heard and believed that the English were mad, and now he knew it.

As a punishment for murder he had got a birching that merely tickled him, and a free ticket to seven years’ board, lodging, clothing, lighting, medical care, instruction and diversion!

Wow!

Were it not for the presence of the insolent, ignorant, untravelled, inexperienced, soft-living, lily-livered dogs of inhabitants, the place was the Earthly Paradise.  They were the crocodile in the ointment.

A young Brahmin, son of a well-paid Government servant, and incarcerated for forgery and theft, was his most annoying persecutor.  He was at great pains to expectorate and murmur “Hubshi” in accents of abhorrent contempt, whenever Moussa Isa chanced between the wind and his nobility.

The first time, Moussa replied with pitying magnanimity and all reasonableness:—­

“I am not a Hubshi, but a Somali, which is quite different—­even as a lion is different from a jackal or a man from an ape”.

To which the Brahmin replied but:—­

“Hubshi,” and pointed out that there was danger of Moussa Isa’s shadow touching him, if Moussa were not careful.

“I must kill you if you call me Hubshi, understanding that I am of the Somals,” said Moussa Isa.

“Hubshi,” would the Brahmin reply and loudly bewail his evil Luck which had put him in the power of the accursed Feringhi Government—­a Government that compelled a Brahmin to breathe the same air as a filthy negro dog, a Woolly One of Africa, barely human and most untouchable, a living Contamination ... and Moussa cast about for a weapon.

His first opportunity arose when he found the Brahmin, who was in the book-binding and compositor department, working one day in the same gardening-gang with himself.

He had but a watering-can by way of offensive weapon, but good play can be made with a big iron watering-can wielded in the right spirit and the right hand.

Master Brahmin was feebly tapping the earth with a kind of single-headed pick, and watching him, Moussa Isa saw that, in a quarter of an hour or so, he might plausibly and legitimately pass within a yard or two of this his enemy, as he went to and fro between the water-tap and the strip of flower-border that he was sprinkling....  Would they hang him if he killed the Brahmin, or would they feebly flog him again and give him a longer sentence (that he be supported, fed, lodged, clothed and cared for) than the present seven years?