“H’m.  We had the whole of that day, the night, and the next day of it, and only a trifle of dew we wrung out of our clothes and the tent.  And below us was the river going giggle, giggle, round a rock in mid stream.  I never knew such a barrenness of incident, or such a quantity of sensation.  The sun might have had Joshua’s command still upon it for all the motion one could see; and it blazed like a near furnace.  Towards the evening of the first day one of the Derbyshire men said something—­nobody heard what—­and went off round the bend of the cliff.  We heard shots, and when Hooker looked round the corner he was gone.  And in the morning the Sepoy whose leg was shot was in delirium, and jumped or fell over the cliff.  Then we took the mule and shot it, and that must needs go over the cliff too in its last struggles, leaving eight of us.

“We could see the body of the Sepoy down below, with the head in the water.  He was lying face downwards, and so far as I could make out was scarcely smashed at all.  Badly as the Chins might covet his head, they had the sense to leave it alone until the darkness came.

“At first we talked of all the chances there were of the main body hearing the firing, and reckoned whether they would begin to miss us, and all that kind of thing, but we dried up as the evening came on.  The Sepoys played games with bits of stone among themselves, and afterwards told stories.  The night was rather chilly.  The second day nobody spoke.  Our lips were black and our throats afire, and we lay about on the ledge and glared at one another.  Perhaps it’s as well we kept our thoughts to ourselves.  One of the British soldiers began writing some blasphemous rot on the rock with a bit of pipeclay, about his last dying will, until I stopped it.  As I looked over the edge down into the valley and saw the river rippling I was nearly tempted to go after the Sepoy.  It seemed a pleasant and desirable thing to go rushing down through the air with something to drink—­or no more thirst at any rate—­at the bottom.  I remembered in time, though, that I was the officer in command, and my duty to set a good example, and that kept me from any such foolishness.

“Yet, thinking of that, put an idea into my head.  I got up and looked at the tent and tent ropes, and wondered why I had not thought of it before.  Then I came and peered over the cliff again.  This time the height seemed greater and the pose of the Sepoy rather more painful.  But it was that or nothing.  And to cut it short, I parachuted.

“I got a big circle of canvas out of the tent, about three times the size of that table-cover, and plugged the hole in the centre, and I tied eight ropes round it to meet in the middle and make a parachute.  The other chaps lay about and watched me as though they thought it was a new kind of delirium.  Then I explained my notion to the two British soldiers and how I meant to do it, and as soon as the short dusk had darkened into night, I risked it.  They held the thing high up, and I took a run the whole length of the ledge.  The thing filled with air like a sail, but at the edge I will confess I funked and pulled up.