CHAPTER XLIV.

The old saw says, “Let a sleeping dog lie.”  Right....  Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

From diary: 

January 28.  I learned of an official Thug-book the other day.  I was not aware before that there was such a thing.  I am allowed the temporary use of it.  We are making preparations for travel.  Mainly the preparations are purchases of bedding.  This is to be used in sleeping berths in the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of the hotels.  It is not realizable; and yet it is true.  It is a survival; an apparently unnecessary thing which in some strange way has outlived the conditions which once made it necessary.  It comes down from a time when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government—­a shelter, merely, and nothing more.  He had to carry bedding along, or do without.  The dwellings of the English residents are spacious and comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely it must be an odd sight to see half a dozen guests come filing into such a place and dumping blankets and pillows here and there and everywhere.  But custom makes incongruous things congruous.

One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost any shop —­there is no difficulty about it.

January 30.  What a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time!  It was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole world was present—­half of it inside, the other half outside, and both halves, bearing mountainous head-loads of bedding and other freight, trying simultaneously to pass each other, in opposing floods, in one narrow door.  These opposing floods were patient, gentle, long-suffering natives, with whites scattered among them at rare intervals; and wherever a white man’s native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the white man’s privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black things out of it.  In these exhibitions of authority Satan was scandalous.  He was probably a Thug in one of his former incarnations.

Inside the great station, tides upon tides of rainbow-costumed natives swept along, this way and that, in massed and bewildering confusion, eager, anxious, belated, distressed; and washed up to the long trains and flowed into them with their packs and bundles, and disappeared, followed at once by the next wash, the next wave.  And here and there, in the midst of this hurly-burly, and seemingly undisturbed by it, sat great groups of natives on the bare stone floor,—­young,