A steamer—­once familiar in Table Bay—­had landed a few hundred Sikhs and Punjabi Jats—­to each man his bundle—­and the little groups walked uneasy alone, keeping, for many of them had been soldiers, to the military step.  Yes, they said they had come to this country to get work.  News had reached their villages that work at great wages was to be had in this country.  Their brethren who had gone before had sent them the news.  Yes, and sometimes the money for the passage out.  The money would be paid back from the so-great wages to come.  With interest?  Assuredly with interest..  Did men lend money for nothing in any country?  They were waiting for their brethren to come and show them where to eat, and later, how to work.  Meanwhile this was a new country.  How could they say anything about it?  No, it was not like Gurgaon or Shahpur or Jullundur.  The Sickness (plague) had come to all these places.  It had come into the Punjab by every road, and many—­many—­many had died.  The crops, too, had failed in some districts.  Hearing the news about these so-great wages they had taken ship for the belly’s sake—­for the money’s sake—­for the children’s sake.

‘Would they go back again?’

They grinned as they nudged each other.  The Sahib had not quite understood.  They had come over for the sake of the money—­the rupees, no, the dollars.  The Punjab was their home where their villages lay, where their people were waiting.  Without doubt—­without doubt—­they would go back.  Then came the brethren already working in the mills—­cosmopolitans dressed in ready-made clothes, and smoking cigarettes.

‘This way, O you people,’ they cried.  The bundles were reshouldered and the turbaned knots melted away.  The last words I caught were true Sikh talk:  ‘But what about the money, O my brother?’

Some Punjabis have found out that money can be too dearly bought.

There was a Sikh in a sawmill, had been driver in a mountain battery at home.  Himself he was from Amritsar. (Oh, pleasant as cold water in a thirsty land is the sound of a familiar name in a fair country!)

‘But you had your pension.  Why did you come here?’

’Heaven-born, because my sense was little.  And there was also the Sickness at Amritsar.’

(The historian a hundred years hence will be able to write a book on economic changes brought about by pestilence.  There is a very interesting study somewhere of the social and commercial effects of the Black Death in England.)

On a wharf, waiting for a steamer, some thirty Sikhs, many of them wearing their old uniforms (which should not be allowed) were talking at the tops of their voices, so that the shed rang like an Indian railway station.  A suggestion that if they spoke lower life would be easier was instantly adopted.  Then a senior officer with a British India medal asked hopefully:  ‘Has the Sahib any orders where we are to go?’

Alas he had none—­nothing but goodwill and greetings for the sons of the Khalsa, and they tramped off in fours.