So it came about without any undue fuss that, after surviving the excruciating heat of the railway journey, three sahibs, two mem-sahibs, and their servants steamed out of Kulna in two launches to Tiger’s Point, where awaited them the finest shikari in all Bengal, with an adequate retinue in which was included a chukler or skin dresser.

And who would notice the look in an ayah’s eyes as she wiped her beloved mem-sahib’s ant-ridden bunk with cotton-waste soaked in kerosene, and who on earth would connect the jungle guide with the British Museum.

CHAPTER XXX

  “A mighty hunter, and his prey was man!”—­Pope.

It was the second evening and they were nearing the ruined temple.

Walking silently and in single file along a faintly discernible track is an eerie proceeding if you are not used to the Sunderbunds.

True, in this jungle there are no serpent-like creepers festooned from tree to tree to impede your progress, or luxuriant and rank vegetation to hide snakes and other poisonous reptiles; neither is there a canopy of thick dark leaves above to obliterate the light of day, or the stars at night.

But the space between the crowding sundri trees which predominate, is packed with an undergrowth of light shrubs through which you have to force and tear your way if you lose the track; and you trip and twist your ankle at every step on the abominable sundri breathers which thrust themselves through the soil at every inch, and vary in thickness from a stick of vermicelli to a good stout bough.

“Look,” will whisper your shikari as he sinks silently to the ground; and look you do with all your eye-power, and yet fail to see the spotted deer gazing at you, motionless from sheer fright, only a few yards away in the undergrowth, so at one is the animal’s colouring with the dappled shadows on the leaves.

What depths of humiliation you plumb when the deer flees to safety through the trees and your shikari sighs.

Leonie as a gun had proved a dire, undiluted failure.

As a companion no one could beat her.  Nothing tired her, nothing dismayed her.  The terrific heat, the untoward hours and meals, the sting of mosquito, and the rip of the thorn left her unmoved.

She and Edna Talbot had gleefully climbed the ladder up to one of the two suapattah huts, which are a kind of shelter of leaves built for the sundri wood collector upon high platforms near the water, and in which they had passed their first vermin-stricken night.  They had climbed cheerfully down the next morning without a word of complaint about the hours of torture they had endured as they sat at the hut door in the light of the moon, whiling away the time until the jungle cocks should crow by watching various shapes come down to the creek to drink.

But the first time a deer, hypnotised by fear or curiosity, had stood stock-still before her, simply asking for death, Leonie put her gun down and shook her head.