Do you know what fear is?  Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see—­fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat—­fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work?  This is a fine Fear—­a great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated.  The very improbability of billiards in a dak-bungalow proved the reality of the thing.  No man—­drunk or sober—­could imagine a game at billiards, or invent the spitting crack of a “screw-cannon.”

A severe course of dak-bungalows has this disadvantage—­it breeds infinite credulity.  If a man said to a confirmed dak-bungalow-haunter:—­“There is a corpse in the next room, and there’s a mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away,” the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in a dak-bungalow.

This credulity, unfortunately, extends to ghosts.  A rational person fresh from his own house would have turned on his side and slept.  I did not.  So surely as I was given up as a bad carcass by the scores of things in the bed because the bulk of my blood was in my heart, so surely did I hear every stroke of a long game at billiards played in the echoing room behind the iron-barred door.  My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker.  It was an absurd fear; because creatures who could play in the dark would be above such superfluities.  I only know that that was my terror; and it was real.

After a long, long while the game stopped, and the door banged.  I slept because I was dead tired.  Otherwise I should have preferred to have kept awake.  Not for everything in Asia would I have dropped the door-bar and peered into the dark of the next room.

When the morning came, I considered that I had done well and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure.

“By the way, khansamah,” I said, “what were those three doolies doing in my compound in the night?”

“There were no doolies,” said the khansamah.

I went into the next room and the daylight streamed through the open door.  I was immensely brave.  I would, at that hour, have played Black Pool with the owner of the big Black Pool down below.

“Has this place always been a dak-bungalow?” I asked.

“No,” said the khansamah.  “Ten or twenty years ago, I have forgotten how long, it was a billiard room.”

“A how much?”

“A billiard room for the Sahibs who built the Railway.  I was khansamah then in the big house where all the Railway-Sahibs lived, and I used to come across with brandy-shrab.  These three rooms were all one, and they held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening.  But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the Railway runs, you say, nearly to Kabul.”