There did not obtrude into his mental retrospect as an accusation against this unwarrantable tenderness the vision of the Resident’s daughter—­almost his fiancee.  Indeed Elizabeth was the antithesis in physical appeal of the gentle Gulab; the drawing-room perhaps; repartee of Damascus steel fineness; tutored polish, class, cold integrity—­these things associated admirably with the unsensuous Elizabeth.  Thoughts of her, remembrances, had no place in glamorous perfumed moonlight.

So he set his teeth and admonished the grey Turcoman, called him the decrepit son of a donkey, being without speed; and to punish him stroked his neck gently:  even this forced diversion bringing him closer to the torturing sweetness of the girl.

But now he was aware of a throbbing on the night wind, and a faint shrill note that lay deep in the shadows beyond.  It was a curious rumbling noise, as though ghosts of the hills on the right were playing bowls with rounded rocks.  And the shrilling skirl grew louder as if men marched behind bagpipes.

The Gulab heard it, too, and her body stiffened, her head thrust from the enveloping cloak, and her eyes showed like darkened sapphires.

“Carts carrying cotton perhaps,” he said.  But presently he knew that small cotton carts but rattled, the volume of rumbling was as if an army moved.

From up the road floated the staccato note of a staff beating its surface, and the clanking tinkle of an iron ring against the wooden staff.

“A mail-carrier,” Barlow said.

And then to the monotonous pat-pat-pat of trotting feet the mail-carrier emerged from the grey wall of night.

“Here, you, what comes?” the Captain queried, checking the grey.

The postie stopped in terror at the English voice.

“Salaam, Bahadur Sahib; it is war.”

“Thou art a tree owl,” and Barlow laughed.  “A war does not spring up like a drift of driven dust.  Is it some raja’s elephants and carts with his harem going to a durbar?”

“Sahib, it is, as I have said, war.  The big brass cannon that is called ‘The Humbler of Cities,’ goes forth to speak its order, and with it are sepoys to feed it the food of destruction.  Beyond that I know not, Sahib, for I am a man of peace, being but a runner of the post.”

Then he salaamed and sifted into the night gloom like a thrown handful of white sand, echoing back the clamp-clamp-clamp of his staff’s iron ring, which was a signal to all cobras to move from the path of him who ran, slip their chilled folds from the warm dust of the road.

And on in front what had been sounds of mystery was now a turmoil of noises.  The hissing screech, the wails, were the expostulations of tortured axles; the rumbling boom was unexplainable; but the jungle of the hillside was possessed of screaming devils.  Black-faced, white-whiskered monkeys roused by the din, screamed cries of hate and alarm as they scurried in volplaning leaps from tree to tree.  And peacocks, awakened when they should have slept, called with their harsh voices from lofty perches.